{"id":892378,"date":"2026-09-12T00:34:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-12T00:34:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/892378\/"},"modified":"2026-09-12T00:34:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T00:34:10","slug":"how-obsession-became-tiffs-biggest-festival-sale-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/892378\/","title":{"rendered":"How ‘Obsession’ Became TIFF’s Biggest Festival Sale Ever"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThere has probably never been a worse moment to open a film<\/a> market in Canada.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe country is locked in a grinding trade war with its largest partner and closest neighbor; tariff threats have crept from steel and lumber into the entertainment conversation, and the independent film business \u2014 the actual product on offer in Toronto this week \u2014 is in the middle of its own slow-motion restructuring. The class of buoyant new distributors who arrived at TIFF two years ago with fresh cash and big talk has thinned out considerably. Streamers are buying less and paying less. Theatrical is a coin flip.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd yet TIFF: The Market, which runs Sept.\u202f10-16 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre alongside North America\u2019s largest film festival, opens with something no first-year market has any right to: momentum, and a founding legend.<\/p>\n

\n\tA legend called\u00a0Obsession<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tTwelve months ago, a 25-year-old YouTube sketch comedian walked into the Royal Alexandra Theatre with a horror<\/a> movie he had shot for $750,000 with a cast of unknowns. He walked out with one of the biggest TIFF acquisition ever \u2014 an estimated $15\u202fmillion worldwide deal with Focus Features \u2014 and the film went on to gross $513\u202fmillion globally, becoming the top-grossing festival pickup of all time.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn fact, the story of\u00a0Obsession\u2019s TIFF triumph actually started on the Croisette. Capstone exec\u00a0Ruzanna Kegeyan\u00a0\u2014 who had sold 2010 Midnight Madness breakout\u00a0Insidious\u00a0worldwide \u2014 ambushed TIFF programmer\u00a0Peter Kuplowsky\u00a0the minute he landed in Cannes. \u201cShe said, \u2018Have you heard of\u00a0Curry Barker<\/a>?\u2019 Initially, I blanked,\u201d Kuplowsky says. Then she mentioned the YouTube sketches, and a long-held theory clicked into place. \u201cI\u2019ve long had the belief that sketch comedy writers make terrific horror filmmakers,\u201d he says, citing\u00a0Zach Cregger\u00a0applying setup-and-payoff structure to\u00a0Barbarian. Kegeyan sent a rough cut; Kuplowsky watched it a week later and emailed her before it was even finished.<\/p>\n

\n\tThen came the phase no market can manufacture, only host: the whisper campaign. Nobody was screening the film. So the calls came to the programmer instead. \u201cIt was constantly, \u2018How good is it? Is it this?\u2019\u202f\u201d Kuplowsky says. \u201cAnd I was like, \u2018Well, I\u2019m invoking\u00a0Barbarian\u00a0in my note, so I think it\u2019s as good as\u00a0Barbarian.\u2019 And they\u2019re like, \u2018What does that mean, that it\u2019s going to make $40 million?\u2019 And I\u2019m like, \u2018I would hope so. I think it depends on who buys it and how they release it.\u2019\u202f\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDays before the premiere,\u00a0Jason Blum,\u00a0Weapons\u00a0producer\u00a0Roy Lee\u00a0and\u00a0Paranormal Activity\u00a0producer\u00a0Steven Schneider\u00a0preemptively greenlit Barker\u2019s follow-up project,\u00a0Anything but Ghosts, alongside Divide\/Conquer\u2019s\u00a0Adam Hendricks\u00a0and\u00a0Greg Gilreath. In hindsight, it was the best marketing spend of the festival: three of horror\u2019s shrewdest operators publicly betting on a filmmaker whose movie no one had seen.<\/p>\n

\n\tBy the time\u00a0Obsession\u00a0made it to TIFF, the buzz on social media had become deafening. \u201cI remember coming out onstage for the screening, and there were people in the audience that were already chanting Curry Barker\u2019s name,\u201d Kuplowsky says. \u201cThen TIFF Next Wave came out and read their introduction, describing why they connected to this film. And I pointed to them and said, \u2018Buyers, this is your audience. Pay attention.\u2019\u202f\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBlum sprinted in during the preshow. Kuplowsky stood at the back the whole time, watching the crowd more than the film. \u201cSo electric. Every moment was working. The big jump scares got everyone out of their seat.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tChristian Mercuri\u00a0of Capstone, which financed the film, had felt it in the room. \u201cYou can tell during the screening,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd then \u2014 it\u2019s not that we said 100\u202fpercent we\u2019re selling it. We had to sit with everybody that was interested and determine that that was the right path. It was a couple of days of negotiations, and then we felt we had the right partner.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBarker\u2019s team spent the next 24 hours in meetings, landing at roughly 1\u202fa.m. Sunday on Focus, which beat A24 and Neon largely on the strength of a global distribution apparatus its rivals don\u2019t have. CAA and Capstone closed it.<\/p>\n

\n\tObsession\u00a0was not a triumph of the traditional system. It was a triumph around it. The film cost less than a studio spends on a trailer, was made by a director whose audience was built for free on YouTube, and was launched by buzz, word-of-mouth and the magic of a Midnight Madness crowd. At a time when the traditional indie model \u2014 established IP, star-driven packaging, presales stitched together territory by territory \u2014 looks shaky,\u00a0Obsession\u00a0offers an alternative.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe lesson of\u00a0Obsession, Mercuri says, is to bet on \u201coriginal content, original ideas and strategies that \u201cpush the envelope and take risks. As an industry, it\u2019s sort of our responsibility to listen to some new voices, not always do the same old, same old. The core of it is original fare.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNobody expects this week to turn a $750,000 negative into $513\u202fmillion. That was never the bet. The bet is that what happened in the Royal Alexandra last year \u2014 a room full of professionals watching a debut feature work, in real time, on an audience \u2014 is worth building a market around. Not because it can be repeated on schedule, but because it proved the thing everyone had started to doubt: that an original idea, made cheap and launched smart, can still detonate.<\/p>\n

\n\tA market has to be built on something. Worse foundations have held.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There has probably never been a worse moment to open a film market in Canada. The country is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":892379,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,65684,75,1554,367,77,68813,304983,294539,2559],"class_list":["post-892378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-curry-barker","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-horror","tag-international","tag-obsession","tag-tiff-2026","tag-toronto-2026","tag-toronto-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=892378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/892379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=892378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=892378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=892378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}