The indie horror film “Obsession” is an unmistakable sign of Gen Z’s box-office power, an original movie that has made $300 million on a $750,000 budget.
It is a blockbuster theatrical debut for the 26-year-old writer and director Curry Barker; the biggest hit ever for Focus Features; and a financial boon for Jason Blum, the horror impresario and executive producer. It is also a welcome boost to theaters, which take home about half of ticket sales.
But not everybody gets a cut of the windfall.
Rekindling a debate about who should benefit when a small production becomes a global phenomenon, the art director of “Obsession” disclosed her paycheck for about three weeks of work: $6,741.36, after taxes.
The art director, Sally Choi, wrote on social media that she had agreed to the rate but was living paycheck to paycheck. She said she filled many roles, as staff on low-budget productions commonly do, and suffered a “physical toll” that caused her to lose weight.
“This is the reality of most filmmakers especially those who work below the line,” Choi wrote. “We become a line in the budget sheet to keep as low as possible.”
Choi and representatives for Blumhouse Productions and Barker did not respond to requests for comment. A representative for Focus Features declined to comment.
Profit-sharing has long been a point of contention in the entertainment industry: After the success of “Hamilton” on Broadway, cast members negotiated themselves a percentage of the earnings.
“Obsession,” which features Inde Navarrette as a lovesick girlfriend, is not the first horror film to wildly transcend expectations. When it happened to “The Blair Witch Project” in 1999, the directors and writers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez were stunned. Even after promising early reactions, they thought they would at best draw the buzz of fellow indies “El Mariachi” and “Clerks.”
Instead, their pet project made nearly $250 million worldwide, not adjusting for inflation, on a budget of about $60,000.
In an interview, Sánchez said they tried to be generous, allocating a share of profits to anyone who had made creative contributions and rehiring production staff for reshoots. He recalled his team writing checks to one crew member who they felt deserved more pay.
“It wasn’t like we gave up hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Sánchez said. “We just tried to equalize a little bit.”
When a film is catapulted to profitability, Sánchez said, those who worked on it are bound to feel they deserve a piece of the pie. He said that he had to “lawyer up” to get what he was owed from the movie’s distributor, and that studios were prone to muddying profits to avoid paying.
Sánchez added that while crew members could always collect their paychecks and go on to the next project, “if ‘Blair Witch’ hadn’t made any money, I would have been personally bankrupt.”
When Choi, the “Obsession” art director, posted about her frustration, she received some supportive comments. But many were critical, arguing that she did not deserve more money just because the film became successful, and that she had sabotaged her employment prospects by speaking up. Choi did not advocate a resolution, aside from saying that she regretted not “flipping” the production to union status for crew members.
Her detractors say that the parties who benefit most when a film succeeds typically take on the bulk of financial risk.
But alternative business models are cropping up. The team behind the drama “Sing Sing” (2024) built equity for cast and crew into its financial structure; everyone received the same pay rate, including the Oscar nominee Colman Domingo. The actress and producer Zendaya used a similar profit-sharing model on her 2021 film “Malcolm & Marie.”
Zack Larez, a storyboard artist and co-chair of the Young Artists Committee of the Art Directors Guild, a labor union, took issue with the idea that crew members do not take on risk. Speaking as an individual and not on behalf of the guild or its committees, Larez said that when crew members accepted low pay on an independent production, they were essentially “subsidizing lower risk to the investors.”
What they are saying is, “in essence, I’m investing in your movie with the money that you’re not paying me,” he said.
For every art director who tries to negotiate for provisions like profit participation, Larez said, there is another who will swoop in to replace them while demanding nothing. Even a prestigious credit like “Obsession” cannot protect you from that.
Mynette Louie, a producer and Columbia University film professor, said the pressure to make movies for as little as possible is a major reason productions are fleeing Los Angeles and the United States altogether to avoid union rates.
Studios and unions, Louie said, needed to work together on solutions that enabled producers to make their low-budget passion projects and that promoted more equity among production teams. She commended Choi for recognizing that being paid $300 per day on a film that crossed $300 million worldwide is unjust.
“If you just kind of look at it on its face, objectively, it isn’t fair,” she said.
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