How YouTube Short 'The Chair' Sparked $224M Hit 'Obsession'
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- James Harris spotted Curry Barker's 22-minute YouTube short "The Chair" in 2023 and brought it to his co-founded company Tea Shop Productions, which then produced Barker's debut feature "Obsession."
- "Obsession" has grossed $224 million worldwide on a $750,000 budget in four weeks — the first non-festive wide release since "E.T." to post three consecutive box office increases — and is now the highest-grossing release ever for Focus Features, which acquired it for $15 million after Toronto.
- Tea Shop Productions, founded in 2010 by British expats Harris and Mark Lane, had its previous high-water mark with 2017 shark thriller "47 Meters Down" at $62.5 million before "Obsession" shattered that benchmark more than threefold.
- Curry Barker has already shot his second feature, supernatural horror "Anything But Ghosts" starring Aaron Paul and Bryce Dallas Howard, for Blumhouse, and is plotting a third.
- Harris cautioned aspiring YouTube filmmakers not to skip the low-budget proving-ground step, warning that jumping straight to $20 million studio films risks going "back to the beginning again" if they don't land it.
- Mark Lane attributed the breakout in part to "a huge element of luck," noting the industry's response has been that "it could happen to us as well."
Why it matters: Tea Shop Productions — a British-founded company that had previously topped out at $62.5 million with '47 Meters Down' — has now delivered Focus Features' biggest hit of all time at $224 million on a $750,000 budget, and Harris says that success will make it easier to attract bigger talent and greenlight riskier genre material while the company remains committed to discovering filmmakers the way it discovered Barker on YouTube.
