It is abundantly clear now that we have one of the biggest cinematic success stories of 2026 in the form of Obsession, the highly scored horror film among both critics and audiences that is about to hit two extremely impressive milestones.
The key here is “word of mouth.” Obsession already did well its opening weekend, putting up $17 million domestically, arriving in third place behind only blockbusters like Michael and The Devil Wears Prada 2. But after that? Obsession immediately started winning the box office every weekday, and now, that leads into this weekend.
Obsession appears to be on the verge of actually increasing its second-weekend box office over its first, something that very, very rarely happens. That nearly happened with Sinners last year, which suffered only a ~5% drop between weekends, but this is an industry where only losing half your audience between weekends is very good. Going up the following week is something very, very rarely seen.
The second milestone that could be hit this weekend, or shortly thereafter, is Obsession hitting $100 million in earnings. That would make it one of the lowest-cost-to-highest-grossing films ever, as it is doing so on a $750,000-$1 million budget, a 100x multiplier at worst. And it may go higher than that. This almost always happens only in horror, and you can probably think of two other examples that fit this category: The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. There are more, but very, very few with a ratio this extreme, as that amount of money isn’t just cheap, it’s below almost every other wide-release film in theaters at any given time. And if anything is on that level, you’re not going to see earnings anywhere close to this.
One thing that Obsession will not do this weekend is win the box office. It unfortunately has to deal with The Mandalorian and Grogu’s opening weekend, the first Star Wars movie in seven years. It does seem to be underperforming all past Disney Star Wars movies, even Solo, but even that means we’re probably looking at a $80 million domestic opening or so. Still, Obsession is obviously for a wildly different crowd, for the most part.
Obsession is receiving an incredible amount of press, most recently a Variety piece pushing for almost total newcomer Inde Navarrette to be a serious awards show contender. That would be in a year that follows Amy Madigan winning Best Supporting Actress for Weapons, and if you’ve seen both, I mean, it’s easy to see how Navarrette is as good (or significantly better). The idea here would be that, despite her screen time, she might be submitted for supporting, as she would likely have a better chance of winning over heavier hitters in the main Best Actress category. But the fact that we’re even having these conversations at all is crazy. And well-deserved.
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