I think Obsession is overhyped. I’ve been a festival regular for years, and there’s always much stronger material in the Midnight Madness section, including films that don’t get distribution. And judging by the accounts that Curry Barker underpaid his crew and didn’t own it, he’s not getting another cent from me.
Back to the topic, I do think that most casual moviegoers don’t even know who made the movie, unless it’s already a famous figure and the marketing campaign leads with that. Otherwise, it’s really about financing and a prestige cast that gets the movie seen.
I haven’t seen it yet but I honestly think it’s just one of those crazy statistical outliers. Did you like Blair Witch? Have any other recent things you liked? Always looking for recommendations.
I also agree that most people have no idea who the filmmaker is. Some might know the lead actor but the population that follows directors is quite limited.
Of course most casual moviegoers don't know who made the movie. None of them will even walk away and know about Curry Baker. The reason Focus and A24 were willing to pay is because of Baker's built-in audience guaranteeing invaluable organic marketing and free buzz, and essentially less risk. Distributors understand this and see it as a springboard for the project. It doesn't matter how strong the Midnight Madness section usually is without Obsession. This is why it sold.
In 2026, you need a set of dedicated, loyal consumers to make noise in order to spread your work. It's less about conversion and more about your core audience sending waves across the culture through algorithms, platforms and most crucially word of mouth. Case in point of this in recent years is Taylor Swift, Kanye West and even Donald Trump. Their strategies is not to convince anyone, just rally, rally rally the core base.
I think you’re replying to something different from what I actually said here. I know how distribution works, and I know the whole Obsession story. I’m just pointing out that it’s been presented as something better than it actually was, as a movie that had merits on its own and was somewhat exceptional.
And I still think it’s overhyped, even with the marketing strategy. The point about guerrilla marketing is that it works directly with the audience and functions as a kind of democracy. People trust you, and that’s why they buy a ticket. Once you betray that trust, it can seriously affect your numbers.
And people talk about followers a lot, but I have yet to see a really successful marketing case based solely on social media. From what I remember, Obsession actually had a PR agent, and it was offline events that contributed to its success.
When I say followers, it has nothing to do with social media. It has to do with the fact that Baker has fans. Fans who are excited, willing to spread the word, and buy those initial however-many-hundred-thousand-dollars-worth of tickets to get the train rolling.
If having a PR agent is all that matters, Mandalorian should have mogged both Backrooms and Obsession.
Isn’t a horror film from practically unknown director in the mainstream, making over 300m on a 750k, literally the opposite of something being overhyped, and rather, living up to the hype? It even kept growing during the opening of its competitor, Backrooms, which targets the exact same audience, with several A-list actors plus the A24 marketing machine involved. Despite that, Obsession won the box office war.
Isn’t this as organic as growth gets in the current state of media and culture?
If you disagree, kindly elaborate, because I don’t understand.
I’d be interested in the gender breakdown of people pursuing a career as a director at the *absolute beginning* of the pipeline, and how different selection points in the pipeline change the gender breakdown.
For example, how many men vs women want to become directors in the first place? Whether you measure that by film school applications, or people posting their first film to YouTube, etc.
Then, as the financial risks and opportunity costs mount for what else you could be doing with your prime earning years, how many men versus women still pursue careers as professional directors?
Men are vastly more likely to go into other risky professional careers like poker playing, Wall Street trading, and extreme sports. It would be logical that more men gamble their time and money trying to make a hit in Hollywood.
And that’s before you control for how much audiences like their films. People who make financially successful movies are more likely to get financing to make more successful movies. That may not be perfectly gender-balanced either.
None of this is to discourage individual women from going into filmmaking. People should pursue what they love! It just seems naive to expect men and women as *populations* to have perfectly balanced interests, risk tolerance, and so on, and for that not to have an outsized impact on their resulting career paths.
It’s a really fascinating question. I was reading Joyce Berenson’s Warriors and Worriers, which is really interesting.
Testosterone drives risky behavior, as we’ve all seen. Making an indie movie, or any movie, is extremely risky, and honestly kind of stupid. Like founding a startup etc. the odds are so fantastically against any of them even being finished, let alone premiering at a top festival etc. etc.
I think that is probably a part of it, but how much to pin it on is hard to say.
Unfortunately a lot of the data looks at the end of the pipeline, which is essy to measure, instead of the beginning and middle, which is a lot more work. But honestly it would be far more useful.
Anecdotally the winnowing at every phase is quite extreme: into film school, into top festivals, into first features, into paying careers. It’s brutal.
The what is easier to study than the why unfortunately, and there are not a lot of great incentives to understand the why, which is so much harder than the what.
This was a great read. Have you written or do you have any interest in dissecting numbers for POC and/or LGBTQ directors? I've yet to read your Annenberg study post so apologies if you've already tackled it there.
The annenberg study has a section dedicated to Bipoc directors. It’s similarly flawed in its expression to the female directors. But that number has also roughly doubled since 2007. I suspect that because there are so many different groups contained in BIPOC, that some of the growth concentrates in higher earning, higher education achieving socioeconomic groups. For example, all of the female POC directors from 2025 were asian, and there were 8 of them (including codirectors), compared to two white women. I talk about that some in my chloe zhao piece.
Can never underestimate the power of rich kids and although I know they're talented and work hard, so does everyone else. :) wish I could say I wasn't surprised Chloe Zhao was from a wealthy family but that did catch me off guard. Anyway onto to reading your Annenberg piece!
Thanks! I’ve looked into it a little bit, there is a shorter section on POC directors in the Annenberg piece. Sundance does publish some data on LGBTQ directors, but a lot less from what I can find. Is there an angle you’re interested in?
Tbh just interested in what comes up from the numbers. Idk what the latest pessimist activist Hollywood headlines are for POC or LGBTQ directors and how that lines up with the data. I'm personally interested in how writers are represented but I know that's a more niche topic in Hollywood compared to directors and actors.
I feel like this blizzard of statistics and arguments obscures something that everyone already knows, that very few women are crazy and ambitious and egotistical enough to direct movies, especially big movies.
Feminists are always trying to have it both ways. They complain that men are overbearing and egotistical and domineering, and then they complain that women aren't succeeding in roles that benefit from an overbearing, egotistical, domineering temperament. To succeed in those roles, women would have to be as big assholes as men. But luckily for the human race (and unluckily for female directors), women are not as big assholes as men.
As an unwashed hipster I'd rather watch smaller, quieter films anyway. I'm perfectly happy with Debra Granik and Kelly Reichardt. I enjoyed Ladybird but I'd rather blow my brains out than watch Barbie.
I don’t know how much time you’ve spent with women, but plenty of us are crazy, ambitious, and egotistical. Check out literally any episode of any Real Housewives franchise and you will understand what I’m talking about.
“Camille Paglia: “Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence… There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.”
Paglia’s argument was not that women are less intelligent or less capable. Rather, she was making a deliberately provocative claim that the same traits that can produce extreme genius can also produce extreme pathology—obsessiveness, single-mindedness, and a willingness to detach from ordinary social and emotional constraints. She argued that men are disproportionately represented at both extremes of achievement and destructiveness. “
To me the above speaks to Daniel’s point here - where is the female Fellini or Tarantino? Scorsese is known for being a walking encyclopedia of film whose whole life has been based around sitting in a dark room watching movies. Men for the most part are so much more interested in ‘things’ rather than people and women vice versa, which would also explain the authors observation that most female directors tend towards drama as a genre.. Kathryn bigelow is an obvious example that springs to mind as a more ‘male’ skewing director, while Eric Rohmer made very sensitive female centric movies with an almost exclusively female cast and crew..
I think Obsession is overhyped. I’ve been a festival regular for years, and there’s always much stronger material in the Midnight Madness section, including films that don’t get distribution. And judging by the accounts that Curry Barker underpaid his crew and didn’t own it, he’s not getting another cent from me.
Back to the topic, I do think that most casual moviegoers don’t even know who made the movie, unless it’s already a famous figure and the marketing campaign leads with that. Otherwise, it’s really about financing and a prestige cast that gets the movie seen.
I haven’t seen it yet but I honestly think it’s just one of those crazy statistical outliers. Did you like Blair Witch? Have any other recent things you liked? Always looking for recommendations.
I also agree that most people have no idea who the filmmaker is. Some might know the lead actor but the population that follows directors is quite limited.
Of course most casual moviegoers don't know who made the movie. None of them will even walk away and know about Curry Baker. The reason Focus and A24 were willing to pay is because of Baker's built-in audience guaranteeing invaluable organic marketing and free buzz, and essentially less risk. Distributors understand this and see it as a springboard for the project. It doesn't matter how strong the Midnight Madness section usually is without Obsession. This is why it sold.
In 2026, you need a set of dedicated, loyal consumers to make noise in order to spread your work. It's less about conversion and more about your core audience sending waves across the culture through algorithms, platforms and most crucially word of mouth. Case in point of this in recent years is Taylor Swift, Kanye West and even Donald Trump. Their strategies is not to convince anyone, just rally, rally rally the core base.
I think you’re replying to something different from what I actually said here. I know how distribution works, and I know the whole Obsession story. I’m just pointing out that it’s been presented as something better than it actually was, as a movie that had merits on its own and was somewhat exceptional.
And I still think it’s overhyped, even with the marketing strategy. The point about guerrilla marketing is that it works directly with the audience and functions as a kind of democracy. People trust you, and that’s why they buy a ticket. Once you betray that trust, it can seriously affect your numbers.
And people talk about followers a lot, but I have yet to see a really successful marketing case based solely on social media. From what I remember, Obsession actually had a PR agent, and it was offline events that contributed to its success.
When I say followers, it has nothing to do with social media. It has to do with the fact that Baker has fans. Fans who are excited, willing to spread the word, and buy those initial however-many-hundred-thousand-dollars-worth of tickets to get the train rolling.
If having a PR agent is all that matters, Mandalorian should have mogged both Backrooms and Obsession.
Isn’t a horror film from practically unknown director in the mainstream, making over 300m on a 750k, literally the opposite of something being overhyped, and rather, living up to the hype? It even kept growing during the opening of its competitor, Backrooms, which targets the exact same audience, with several A-list actors plus the A24 marketing machine involved. Despite that, Obsession won the box office war.
Isn’t this as organic as growth gets in the current state of media and culture?
If you disagree, kindly elaborate, because I don’t understand.
I’d be interested in the gender breakdown of people pursuing a career as a director at the *absolute beginning* of the pipeline, and how different selection points in the pipeline change the gender breakdown.
For example, how many men vs women want to become directors in the first place? Whether you measure that by film school applications, or people posting their first film to YouTube, etc.
Then, as the financial risks and opportunity costs mount for what else you could be doing with your prime earning years, how many men versus women still pursue careers as professional directors?
Men are vastly more likely to go into other risky professional careers like poker playing, Wall Street trading, and extreme sports. It would be logical that more men gamble their time and money trying to make a hit in Hollywood.
And that’s before you control for how much audiences like their films. People who make financially successful movies are more likely to get financing to make more successful movies. That may not be perfectly gender-balanced either.
None of this is to discourage individual women from going into filmmaking. People should pursue what they love! It just seems naive to expect men and women as *populations* to have perfectly balanced interests, risk tolerance, and so on, and for that not to have an outsized impact on their resulting career paths.
It’s a really fascinating question. I was reading Joyce Berenson’s Warriors and Worriers, which is really interesting.
Testosterone drives risky behavior, as we’ve all seen. Making an indie movie, or any movie, is extremely risky, and honestly kind of stupid. Like founding a startup etc. the odds are so fantastically against any of them even being finished, let alone premiering at a top festival etc. etc.
I think that is probably a part of it, but how much to pin it on is hard to say.
Unfortunately a lot of the data looks at the end of the pipeline, which is essy to measure, instead of the beginning and middle, which is a lot more work. But honestly it would be far more useful.
Anecdotally the winnowing at every phase is quite extreme: into film school, into top festivals, into first features, into paying careers. It’s brutal.
The what is easier to study than the why unfortunately, and there are not a lot of great incentives to understand the why, which is so much harder than the what.
This was a great read. Have you written or do you have any interest in dissecting numbers for POC and/or LGBTQ directors? I've yet to read your Annenberg study post so apologies if you've already tackled it there.
The annenberg study has a section dedicated to Bipoc directors. It’s similarly flawed in its expression to the female directors. But that number has also roughly doubled since 2007. I suspect that because there are so many different groups contained in BIPOC, that some of the growth concentrates in higher earning, higher education achieving socioeconomic groups. For example, all of the female POC directors from 2025 were asian, and there were 8 of them (including codirectors), compared to two white women. I talk about that some in my chloe zhao piece.
Can never underestimate the power of rich kids and although I know they're talented and work hard, so does everyone else. :) wish I could say I wasn't surprised Chloe Zhao was from a wealthy family but that did catch me off guard. Anyway onto to reading your Annenberg piece!
Thanks! I’ve looked into it a little bit, there is a shorter section on POC directors in the Annenberg piece. Sundance does publish some data on LGBTQ directors, but a lot less from what I can find. Is there an angle you’re interested in?
Tbh just interested in what comes up from the numbers. Idk what the latest pessimist activist Hollywood headlines are for POC or LGBTQ directors and how that lines up with the data. I'm personally interested in how writers are represented but I know that's a more niche topic in Hollywood compared to directors and actors.
I feel like this blizzard of statistics and arguments obscures something that everyone already knows, that very few women are crazy and ambitious and egotistical enough to direct movies, especially big movies.
Feminists are always trying to have it both ways. They complain that men are overbearing and egotistical and domineering, and then they complain that women aren't succeeding in roles that benefit from an overbearing, egotistical, domineering temperament. To succeed in those roles, women would have to be as big assholes as men. But luckily for the human race (and unluckily for female directors), women are not as big assholes as men.
As an unwashed hipster I'd rather watch smaller, quieter films anyway. I'm perfectly happy with Debra Granik and Kelly Reichardt. I enjoyed Ladybird but I'd rather blow my brains out than watch Barbie.
I honestly didn’t enjoy Barbie either but love Wendy and Lucy and all of Granik’s work. Ladybird was my favorite of Gerwig’s.
I don’t know how much time you’ve spent with women, but plenty of us are crazy, ambitious, and egotistical. Check out literally any episode of any Real Housewives franchise and you will understand what I’m talking about.
That's bush league egotism compared to what men experience — sorry, but we men are just more unpleasant than you women. Deal with it!
“Camille Paglia: “Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence… There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.”
Paglia’s argument was not that women are less intelligent or less capable. Rather, she was making a deliberately provocative claim that the same traits that can produce extreme genius can also produce extreme pathology—obsessiveness, single-mindedness, and a willingness to detach from ordinary social and emotional constraints. She argued that men are disproportionately represented at both extremes of achievement and destructiveness. “
To me the above speaks to Daniel’s point here - where is the female Fellini or Tarantino? Scorsese is known for being a walking encyclopedia of film whose whole life has been based around sitting in a dark room watching movies. Men for the most part are so much more interested in ‘things’ rather than people and women vice versa, which would also explain the authors observation that most female directors tend towards drama as a genre.. Kathryn bigelow is an obvious example that springs to mind as a more ‘male’ skewing director, while Eric Rohmer made very sensitive female centric movies with an almost exclusively female cast and crew..
I do need to finally read Sexual Personae.
It’s great! Also vamps and tramps
Nice! I have a copy of personae and provocations that have been staring at me for months! Will add vamps and tramps!
Haha Jen Shah would beg to differ