Studios Offered Obsession’s Director A Bigger Budget If He Made Major Script Rewrites, And I’m So Glad He Stood His Ground
The horror genre has been thriving for years now, with some A+ original concepts hitting theaters alongside sequels from beloved horror franchises. One of the best horror movies in recent memory is Obsession, which has been making tons of money off a small budget. Director/writer Curry Barker recently revealed that he was offered millions to make a major change to the movie’s story, and I’m so so glad he turned it down.
Obsession tells the story of Michael Johnson’s Bear, a boy hopelessly in love with his childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette). He makes a wish for her to love him on a toy called the “One Wish Willow”, and the results are horrifying. During an interview with THR, Barker revealed the big change that studios tried to convince him to make, saying:
When we were shopping this around, there were companies that told me they would give me $2 million if I just rewrote the script to make Bear a hero. I was like, ‘I’m not rewriting the script to make Bear a guy that does all the right things. It’s so much more interesting that he doesn’t do the right thing and instead tries to make [the relationship] work and he just keeps making bad decision after bad decision.’
Well, that would have been a very different movie. Bear was very much not a hero in Obsession, and is more focused on his relationship with Nikki… even though he suspects that her sudden affection for him is weird. But he keeps trying, and by the time he realizes the true power of his wish he’s powerless to stop the bloodshed that would come. Giving a him a hero’s story would have likely taken away from the movie’s mystery, as well as how effective its ending ultimately was.
Obsession‘s ending was a bleak but realistic one, where Nikki finally is freed from the wish, and sees carnage all around her. Things would have turned out very differently if Curry had changed the movie to make Bear more of a hero. He went on to speak about his decision, saying:
The movie would have been so boring if Bear was going on a journey to figure out the lore of the One Wish Willow. So I turned down more money to tell the story that I was more interested in telling.
In the end Bear wasn’t very redeemable, and it took him until the movie’s third act until he would try and free Nikki from the wish he put on her. He kills himself to finally free her from the One Wish Willow, although Nikki was left in a house full of dead bodies and a mysterious billion dollars in cash when she finally woke up. Curry Barker seems to think she probably went to prison after the credits rolled, which is pretty bleak.
Obsession and Back Rooms have both been crushing at the box office, further showing the popularity of the horror genre. We’ll have to see if Barker ends up expanding the franchise with a sequel, as the One Wish Willow could go down differently with each wish. One thing is clear: most fans would agree the director made the right call in not altering his movie.
Obsession is still in theaters now as part of the 2026 movie release list. And I can’t wait to see what Curry Barker does next, especially given how he fought for this modern horror classic.
