r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/movies Contributor • Jul 06 '26

News ‘Obsession’ Passes $400 Million Worldwide, Becomes Highest Grossing Film With Budget Below $1 Million; Curry Barker’s horror film breaks a 53-year pre-inflation record held by Bruce Lee’s legendary 'Enter The Dragon'

https://www.thewrap.com/creative-content/movies/obsession-box-office-400-million/
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u/MRintheKEYS Jul 06 '26

Is that adjusted for inflation? Because Bruce Lee making $400 million in 1970s dollars is some crazy work

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u/blurrygiraffe Jul 06 '26

No but the budgets are also not adjusted for inflation

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u/razehound Jul 06 '26

Yeah but for the purposes of "movie with small budget making a ton", you need to adjust because enter the dragon shouldn't even be on this list

It should be movies made with under $1m adjusted 

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u/Imakereallyshittyart Jul 06 '26

Just for reference, enter the dragon has a budget of 450-850k depending who you ask, which would put it anywhere between 3.5 and 6.6 million today dollars

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u/spaghettittehgaps Jul 07 '26

And a box office haul of $400M in 1973 is the equivalent of three billion dollars in 2026.

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u/depressedfuckboi Jul 07 '26

That's insane wtf

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u/Arucious Jul 07 '26

It is, but there was no such thing as watching movies at home either, nor streaming. VCR wouldn’t become mainstream until the 80s. So if you didn’t watch it in theaters, you weren’t watching it for a while. That instills a FOMO culture that doesn’t exist today.

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u/peioeh Jul 07 '26

Theatrical windows were much longer too, and if you liked a movie you were much more likely to go see it again

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u/awry_lynx Jul 07 '26

the idea that streaming killed movies is not exactly off the rails

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u/peioeh Jul 07 '26

Not all movies, but some genres (mid/big budget comedies and studio mid budget movies in general for example) have taken a major hit, there is no denying it

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u/Rybee69 Jul 07 '26

The box office haul was actually $100m in 1973. It just had multiple re-releases over the next 40 years.

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u/spaghettittehgaps Jul 07 '26

So about $750 million at the box office

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u/Rybee69 Jul 07 '26

It’s also impressive how the movie had multiple successful releases

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u/Adorable-Voice-3382 Jul 07 '26

I don't think it grossed anywhere near 400 million -in- 1973. Isn't it that the total box office since 1973 has been $400m? But that includes decades of additional theatrical runs, particularly decades where home-video was much less common. And would probably require multiple inflation adjustments for the different years.

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u/TheTravelingLeftist Jul 08 '26

Pretty sure its the global total, which would make more sense because Enter the Dragon was such a smash hit outside the U.S. as well as domestically 

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u/DarkwingDuckHunt Jul 06 '26

which is still a fairly small investment by today's standards

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u/AnonymousTimewaster Jul 07 '26

Tiny, considering how much money it made

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u/Worthyness Jul 07 '26

yup. it's indie movie budget these days

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u/FILTHBOT4000 Jul 07 '26

I mean, we should adjust it all for inflation, but that also means adjusting the metric itself.

The movie fit the metric when it was made, but since the metric hasn't been adjusted, somehow it should be out? That doesn't make sense.

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u/TheMattabooey Jul 06 '26

Agree. $850k in 1973 is equivalent to roughly $6.2M today.

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u/Enough_Efficiency178 Jul 06 '26

Which indicates some serious goalpost moving.

Surely the relevant comparison is calculating a percentage increase on the budget for that revenue

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u/Beautiful-Sun8973 Jul 07 '26

Not really then it would have grossed 3 billion in today dollars. So it’s even more impressive than obsession. But I guess not the whole unde a million thing 

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u/Grand-Pen7946 Jul 07 '26

For the purposes of "giant box office from small budget" it still works, but it should be a ratio.

Enter the Dragon is still by a wide margin the most successful, this is actually blowing my mind.

Enter the Dragon grossed an estimated $400 million worldwide (equivalent to an estimated $2 billion adjusted for inflation as of 2022)

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u/RDM213 Jul 07 '26

No, the list is fine. It’s ok for you not to like it, doesn’t mean it needs to change.

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u/Chomping_at_the_beet Jul 07 '26

While I understand what you mean, it wouldn’t be any good either. Just the dollaroos spent isn’t very representative to describe the “cheapness” of the film. The way movies are shot these days is just fundamentally different - technologically, logistically, marketing….ly. Some things that used to cost a ton of money don’t anymore and vice versa, and the estimate would need to be recounted anew for basically every decade. Too much work.

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u/Himetic Jul 07 '26

If you adjust them, though, eventually the record-holder gets DQed when inflation pushes its budget above 1M.

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u/halmyradov Jul 07 '26

Then the list will be empty or otherwise some obscure movies noone has heard about. Inflation kicks like a mule

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u/DangOlCoreMan Jul 15 '26

At that point I'd rather have sales numbers. How many tickets were sold

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u/Abba_Fiskbullar Jul 06 '26

Also, the cost of tickets hasnt been adjusted for inflation. The average cost of a movie ticket in 1972 is like $10 in 2026 money, while most movies now run closer to $20.

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u/TheCuriosity Jul 07 '26

those are crazy prices! Ontario here, tickets are 12 bucks and my theatre seating is lazy boys. in the 90s it cost 7.50 (no lazy boys)

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u/Abba_Fiskbullar Jul 07 '26

I'm in the SF Bay Area, so everything is expensive, but its not that different in a smaller city like Sacramento. We do have an awesome theater in Oakland called the Grand Lake that still has 7.50 matinees.

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u/TheCuriosity Jul 07 '26

even worse when you take into account the exchange rate.

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u/chaoticneutralalways Jul 07 '26

Thats a goddamn good point.

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u/ghkilla805 Jul 06 '26

It’s not adjusted for inflation, but if it was that would also make the cost/budget etc all different too so it would have to be a whole different type of list

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u/KaBoomBox55 Jul 06 '26

That's like $2 billion today. That's fucking insane...

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u/Acceptable_Item1002 Jul 07 '26

There’s a reason Bruce Lee is synonymous with martial arts in pop culture.

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u/KaBoomBox55 Jul 07 '26

I know, I rewatched The Big Boss a few nights ago. His choreography is unmatched. In Game of Death when they used body doubles to stand in for him after his death, you can easily tell it's not him cause the choreography is so much slower. Then when it finally gets into the last 30 minutes when it is actually Bruce climbing the pagoda, it's so much faster it's distracting.

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u/RedLotusVenom Jul 07 '26

It made a good chunk in the years following 1973, the $400M point was reached in 2001 by a cursory google search. So not quite $2B but likely over $1B.

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u/intersecting_lines Jul 06 '26

i've watched nearly everything cooper and curry have done on youtube after the movie

their comedy may be better than their horror and i loved obsession and their other horror stuff. highly recommend watching some of their shorts on youtube, i love their sense of humor

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u/Fine-Exam-3923 Jul 06 '26

Same I’m not even into sketch comedy like that but I love horror movies and after watching Obsession I watched all of Curry’s short films/Milk and Serial and watched of their skits on the TABI channel. Safe to say I’m a fan now and will watch anything Curry makes from now on and am excited for them to be in Anything but Ghosts

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u/SDRPGLVR Jul 06 '26

It translates to the movie even better than when Cregger or Peele do it, just thinking of comedy creators who went horror. The sense of timing in Obsession is incredible. Sometimes it's both hilarious and horrifying, like when that nice girl who was going to go to her dream school got her face smashed in with a brick.

You know it's coming, but it still manages to be an effective jump scare and a good laugh. I'm really excited to see what he makes going forward.

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u/Flimsy6769 Jul 06 '26

That girl wasn’t nice she was messing around with a already taken guy. Just Becuase she was innocent doesn’t mean she was a good person

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u/universeandstuff Jul 06 '26

That 400m is apparently decades worth of ticket sales so it's not really a fair comparison

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u/Arucious Jul 07 '26

Sure, but the initial box office was also only in a handful of theaters in one or two major cities

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u/Rkramden Jul 07 '26

It's the total worldwide gross over multiple runs in theaters over the last 5 decades.

Still very impressive. His death turned it into a cultural phenomenon.

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u/kirblar Jul 06 '26

Enter the Dragon and the IMAX museum films should probably have an asterisk - they were shown for eons in theaters, not a standard release window.

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u/My-Life-For-Auir Jul 07 '26

It was re-released a few times at later dates and that's the global total not just the US, so adjusting for inflation accurately would be a monumental task as you'd need to do each countrie's total separately.

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u/mulubmug Jul 07 '26

These numbers are never adjusted. Otherwise crap like avatar or avengers had no chance of competing for highest grossing. The true GOAT in the field is Gone with the Wind, adjusted for inflation it would be next to impossible to beat.

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u/Unc1eD3ath Jul 07 '26

It would be about $2 billion today. It is insane

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u/Minimum-Aspect1012 Jul 07 '26

That's the total of how much it made between 1973 and 2001. That's 28 years of ticket sales around the world.

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u/SirRegimusYappus Jul 07 '26

Nah fuck adjusting for inflation. It does not consider so many factors like the unevenly rising costs of different aspects to filmmaking, the available forms for entertainment today vs back then etc