Obsession Has Outearned All 68 Sundance US Competition Films Since 2020 Combined
Even including streaming acquisitions.
While I was writing about the elitification of Sundance and the explosive box office success of Obsession, a movie made for $750,000, I had a thought.
What if Obsession could actually outgross every Sundance US Dramatic Competition film from the 2020s combined?
It seemed a bit unlikely. There were 68 films in competition at Sundance in the years from 2020-2025 (2026 has mostly not been released yet). Admittedly, that covered the pandemic, but there were also big, outlier streaming deals like Coda, which Apple acquired for $25m, and Fair Play, acquired by Netflix for $20m.
And before anyone asks, the documentary and world-cinema sections gross a fraction of even this, so adding them would likely only deepen the hole.
As of this writing, Obsession has grossed $224m, and is still in theaters. It premiered in the Midnight Madness section of Toronto, so not even in a competitive section.
So I thought I’d do some digging.
The Methodology
Let’s talk about methodology. This is not a strict revenue analysis, it’s a rough estimate designed to give Sundance films every possible benefit of the doubt.
To start, I broke down the box office of every Sundance competition film from 2020 to 2025. I did so using publicly available numbers from Boxofficemojo and the Numbers. But some Sundance films, including many of the largest deals, were for streaming companies who did no domestic theatrical.
To give Sundance every possible advantage, I counted acquisition prices as if they were box office revenue. This artificially inflates the Sundance total, but captures the economic value these films generated at the point of sale.
CODA’s international theatrical gross was roughly $2 million, but I counted it as $27 million because I combined it with the $25m for worldwide-rights deal. Fair Play and Palm Springs received the same treatment. In other words, I have deliberately inflated Sundance’s numbers at nearly every opportunity. If I used actual theatrical grosses, Obsession would have already surpassed the entire cohort.
When it was reported that a movie was acquired for high seven figures, I gave it $9m, which felt appropriate. For mid-high, like The 40 Year Old Version, I put $7m. I always tried to be as generous to the movies as possible, as that’s what helps my case the most. If I couldn’t find a reliable press release or box office tally, I left it off the chart.
Out of 68 films that played in competition from 2020-2025, there were only 7 films I couldn’t find any reliable numbers for. This is actually less than I thought. Assuming some of those were total bombs (reasonable based on the distributors or lack thereof, reviews, etc.), and a handful got picked up for low-mid seven figures, those would roughly average out with the other ones.
The numbers I could realistically estimate are here:
2020 subtotal | 16 Films | $58,883,454
2021 subtotal | 10 films | $43,675,903.00
2022 subtotal | 10 Films | $29,101,995.00
2023 subtotal | 12 Films |$32,891,006.00
2024 subtotal | 10 Films | $33,862,306.00
2025 subtotal | 10 Films | $5,467,701.00
Grand Total 2020-2025 | 68 films | $203,882,365.00
This should be read as a blended “commercial proxy” rather than pure box office, combining theatrical grosses, acquisition values, and conservative estimates for missing data.
For seven of the films, I cannot find any information. If I give each of the seven missing films $1m, some of them are tiny, and likely the absolute flops, others a little less so, this still only gets all of the movies to $211m.
You can see the individual movies and grosses/acquisition prices below. Again, I am happy to issue corrections. The bolded entries won the grand jury prize, italicized are streaming acquisitions prices in lieu of proper box office.
As of this writing, Obsession has pulled in $224m worldwide. It’s currently tracking to make over $250m worldwide.
To show how generous I am actually being, if I take out the major streaming acquisitions (CODA etc.) and use strictly reported theatrical box office ($87M), Obsession has already lapped the entire lineup by almost triple.
That means that one low-budget horror movie has generated more commercial value than the entire Sundance competition lineup from 2020–2025 combined.
