Curry Barker May Hand Off the Film That Made Him

Curry Barker told Focus Features he may produce, not direct, a film version of Milk & Serial, the $800 YouTube horror that still streams for free. Obsession, the $750,000 wish-gone-wrong movie Focus bought for $15 million, has already become the specialty studio’s biggest hit, and the 26-year-old from Mobile, Alabama, is booked through next spring.

The project that made him famous is the one that no longer fits.

Focus Handed Him a Gold Willow

In mid-June, Barker walked into what he thought was a routine meeting at Focus’s Universal City offices. About 250 staffers were waiting with champagne. Chairman Peter Kujawski called Obsession the biggest movie the company has ever had, then handed over a box.

In the music business, they hand out gold records. We don’t do that. So here’s this.

Peter Kujawski, chairman, Focus Features

Inside was a One Wish Willow, the spell branch from the film, cast in gold and sealed in glass. During the press tour Barker had snapped a toy version of the same prop and said he wished Obsession would be a huge hit. The wish landed with the same nasty surplus his movie is about.

“It is like when The Wish gives you more than you bargained for,” Barker said. He was 26, two years removed from a coffee-shop job and an $800 found-footage shoot with his partner Cooper Tomlinson, and studios were already asking what movie he would make if they simply said yes.

One company tried a $10 million offer for his next original, sight unseen. Blumhouse-Atomic Monster already held first-negotiation rights from a deal signed before Obsession opened, so the bid backed off. Barker still described the month in the same stunned register. “I realized I can do whatever I want now.”

How Obsession Grew After a $17.2 Million Open

Focus put Obsession in 2,615 theaters on May 15, 2026. Tracking had it at $8 million to $10 million. It did $7 million on Friday and $17.2 million for the weekend, short of a $20 million tattoo pact Barker had made with his agent and manager, then it did the thing horror almost never does. It grew.

THE OPENING MONTH

The second and third weekends both rose, a pattern last seen with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1982. Barker started sneaking into public shows. “I didn’t know that was an option. Like I didn’t think it was mathematically possible.” Nathan Fielder and Tim Robinson reached out. Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, and Paul Thomas Anderson said things in public. “I was becoming numb because it was so unbelievable, my brain couldn’t really process it.”

Box Office Watch now lists $263.5 million in North America and $516.8 million worldwide, a 15.3 times multiple on that $17.2 million start, with $253.3 million from overseas. The film is rated R, runs 1 hour 50 minutes, and holds a CinemaScore of A- plus 96 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Michael Johnston plays Bear, the man who breaks the willow to win Nikki, played by Inde Navarrette. Tomlinson is in the cast. Andy Richter is in it too.

Producer James Harris took the script when Barker was still a YouTube name. Focus won it out of Midnight Madness at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Barker fought to keep a scene in which money falls from a ceiling, and he turned down a $2 million bump from companies that wanted Bear rewritten as a hero. “The movie would have been so boring if Bear was going on a journey to figure out the lore of the One Wish Willow.”

The $800 Movie Still Playing for Free

Milk & Serial is not a lost short. It is a 62-minute feature Barker wrote, directed, edited, scored, and starred in, released on the that’s a bad idea channel on August 8, 2024, after a year of trying to find a distributor. YouTube currently counts 4.3 million views. The file is still up.

Two prank-channel roommates, Milk and Seven, stage a birthday stunt that curdles into a cover-up. Barker plays Milk. Tomlinson plays Seven and produced. They shot for four months on weekends with friends, then cut an 80-minute version down so it would play on the platform that already knew them.

WHAT THE $800 ACTUALLY BOUGHT

• The camera: A Sony camcorder, later sold at a $100 profit, which pulled the true spend closer to break-even.
• The one outsider: Jonnathan Cripple, the only actor they paid who was not already in their circle, also from Barker’s earlier short The Chair.
• The schedule: Four months of friend-group weekends, not a proper shoot calendar.
• The release: A free YouTube drop after traditional distribution did not close, on a comedy channel that now lists about 1.7 million subscribers.

Hollywood’s shorthand says Milk & Serial led straight to Obsession. The order is messier. The Chair, a 2023 haunted-object short, is what got Barker representation and the Obsession job. Milk & Serial landed in August 2024 and, in his words, “catapulted the amount of meetings I was taking.” He signed with UTA in March 2025 while Obsession was still in post.

Now the meetings have inverted. People are mining those early videos for another Obsession, and Barker is the one hesitating to sit in the chair again. “The Chair could definitely be a horror film. I think eventually it would be cool to bring a feature version of the haunted chair story to life. Milk and Serial is probably going to happen [as a film].” Then the line that hangs over the rest of his year: “I wonder if there’s an opportunity to bring somebody else onto Milk and Serial and I’ll produce but not necessarily direct.”

Cooper Tomlinson Never Left the Frame

Every version of this rise still has Tomlinson in it. He produced and starred in Milk & Serial, appears in Obsession, co-wrote Anything But Ghosts, stars in it opposite Barker, and is an executive producer on that film. The sketch channel that’s a bad idea was always a two-hander, closer in spirit to a live-comedy partnership than a solo director brand.

Barker bristles at the YouTuber label anyway. He moved to Los Angeles at 18, which is the old route, and he has said most of their fame started on TikTok, then Instagram, then YouTube. “YouTube was just a platform.” Tomlinson is the continuity the platform cannot take credit for. If someone else directs a Milk & Serial feature, the person who already played Seven and already produced the $800 version is the one who still knows where the bodies are.

That is the unglamorous half of the gold-willow month. Art director Sally Choi posted that she was paid $6,741 on a film that has taken in $516.8 million. Barker, who did not write the checks, said low-budget hits usually enrich the people who took the risk, and that he hoped the crew would get the same career jump he did. The jump, for him, is already a pile of jobs. For the partner who has been on every set, the next one is a co-writing credit and a lead.

Netflix Wanted the Film Off Screens

A year after Toronto, Barker told interviewer Tom Power what the morning after Midnight Madness actually looked like. Missed calls from his manager, his agent, and the financier. Neon, Focus, and A24 all wanted the movie. Netflix’s bid was a different species.

They put in an offer to just put it straight on Netflix.

Curry Barker, writer-director, speaking with Tom Power

Focus paid about $15 million and put it in theaters. The other path was a streaming tile and no second-weekend jump, no 250-person toast, no gold branch in a box. Barker has also said he came close to making a Chair feature as his debut instead of Obsession, which would have left Focus with a different first impression and Milk & Serial as the only long-form calling card.

He wants studios to copy the part of Obsession that had nothing to do with YouTube. They left him alone because the budget was small. “Let a filmmaker take the reins and have creative freedom and not try to stick your claws into it.” On Gen Z ticket buyers, he was blunter. “We’re tired of slop. We want good movies back. People are still hungry for movies that are original without some big IP, as long as the story is good.”

His Next Dates Are Already Booked

That last sentence sits poorly next to the job he took in April. A24 hired him to write and direct a Texas Chainsaw Massacre reimagining, with Roy Lee, Steven Schneider, and original co-writer Kim Henkel among the producers. Barker has said he would not have said yes without a way in that feels new, and that he wants “the rawness and the grounded-ness of the original.” The objection writes itself. He just proved a new story with no inherited killer can do $516.8 million, and the next headline is Leatherface.

The film that actually occupies 2027 is not Milk & Serial and not Chainsaw. It is Anything But Ghosts, which Barker directed and co-wrote with Tomlinson, and which they shot in Vancouver from March 9 to April 11, 2026, under the working title Faraday, before Obsession had played a single paying night. They star as fake ghost hunters who run into real ones. Bryce Dallas Howard, Aaron Paul, Violet McGraw, and Chris Reinacher are in the cast. Jason Blum, Lee, Schneider, Adam Hendricks, and Greg Gilreath produce. Focus is putting it in theaters nationwide on May 7, 2027, with Universal handling overseas, almost a year after Obsession’s May 15 opening.

THE SLATE AROUND THE REMAKE

A Milk & Serial feature would have to squeeze between a finished Focus comedy-horror, an A24 IP job, and whatever original the $10 million crowd was bidding on without a pitch. Barker did not rule it out. He ruled himself out of the only seat that made the $800 version matter, which is the point of getting the thing you asked the willow for.

The 62-minute movie is still on YouTube tonight, un-remade, under a thousand dollars, with Tomlinson in the other half of the frame. The gold branch is in a glass case in Universal City. Those two objects are the whole plot.