If you’ve been living under a rock for the last several weeks, you’ve missed some insufferable Obsession dialogue. You’d think the movie was this complex, unknowable metaphor with the way people are missing the point or making things up. In reality, it’s a subtle but straightforward takedown of cowardly men who like to control women’s bodies.

There is a shocking amount of people who believe Bear, the protagonist and reason everything goes sideways, is actually a victim or at least not the villain. Some people even acted as if it was a revolutionary discovery to say that Bear may actually be the villain here, as if that wasn’t fairly obvious.

Fortunately, that has died down in recent weeks, but Curry Barker just revealed that someone, before the movie was made, asked him to rewrite the script to appease those very misguided people. He confirmed that studios that offered to double the price the film sold for if he would rewrite it with Bear being a hero. Thankfully, he declined.

Bear Is and Always Was the Villain of Obsession

Would you choose the man or the bear? Everyone remember that online debate? Fittingly, the main character of Obsession‘s name is a play on that debate, as he is literally both the man and the bear here. Bear takes Nikki’s body autonomy with his One Wish Willow, and from then on, he makes every wrong choice to further prove his villainy, which ultimately results in the demise of everyone except Nikki, who is left to face the consequences alone.

Can you imagine how much worse the movie would be if Bear was the hero? I’m not even sure how that would work. It’s very clear that Curry Barker set out to tell a story about how bad the people like Bear can be, so it’s impossible to imagine another angle for the movie. Yet, Hollywood tried.

“When we were shopping this around, there were companies that told me they would give me $2 million if I just rewrote the script to make Bear a hero. I was like, ‘I’m not rewriting the script to make Bear a guy that does all the right things. It’s so much more interesting that he doesn’t do the right thing and instead tries to make [the relationship] work, and he just keeps making bad decision after bad decision,’” Barker revealed to The Hollywood Reporter.

He said the only idea along those lines would be Bear continuing to try discovering what the One Wish Willow is, how it works, and how to undo the negative effects like he did when he tried to call the company behind them (for himself, not for Nikki). But Barker said that version of Obsession would’ve been boring, and he’s absolutely right. It would’ve been much worse and would not be nearly as big.

There’s something so refreshing about a popular movie taking down this common and frustrating archetype of a person that often flies under the radar (which may be why people missed the point). Thankfully, that is the movie we ended up receiving, and not the opposite. We can thank Barker, who was firm in his vision, for that.

Conclusion

Obsession is one of the best movies of the year. It works on pretty much every level, and it’s hard to imagine another version of it being nearly as good. Fortunately, Curry Barker turned down a literal $2 million offer to redo it in the opposite way, instead settling on a $1 million offer from Focus Features to put out the movie he originally envisioned. For an artist, that’s a win, but for the audiences, that’s perhaps an even bigger win.