Executive producer sues 'Obsession' backers, alleging she was denied profits from $500 million hit

A producer who says she rescued a low-budget horror film from a botched edit and helped turn it into one of the year's biggest box-office surprises has sued the production company behind it, alleging she was frozen out of the profit share she had been promised once the money started arriving. Leonora Ann Darby, credited as an executive producer on the horror hit Obsession, filed a 135-page breach-of-contract complaint on August 28 against Tea Shop Productions and its co-founders, James Harris and Mark Lane, in Los Angeles Superior Court. The suit, reported by TMZ and other outlets this week, lands as small, cheaply made films have become an outsized source of studio profit, and as the question of who gets paid when one of them breaks out has grown more contentious across the independent film business.

The numbers

Obsession, directed by Curry Barker, is credited on Focus Features' own page for the film to a small producing team that includes Harris. It was made on a reported budget of roughly $750,000, sold to Focus Features for $16.2 million out of the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, and has since taken in more than $500 million worldwide, according to figures cited by Deadline and other trade outlets. Darby's complaint centers on a narrower set of figures: a 2024 agreement she says entitled her to one-third of net profits on any Tea Shop film she lead-produced, plus ongoing access to the collection-account records that track a film's earnings as they come in.

• Reported production budget: about $750,000
• Sale price to Focus Features at Toronto: $16.2 million
• Worldwide box office to date: more than $500 million
• Profit share Darby says she was promised: one-third of net profits on films she lead-produced
• Payments Darby says she has received so far: an initial payment plus $300,000
• Complaint: 135 pages, ten causes of action, filed August 28 in Los Angeles Superior Court

The complaint does not specify a total dollar figure in damages, asking instead for back wages, unpaid bonuses, compensatory damages and a full accounting of profits, a legal process that would require Tea Shop to open its books.

How the dispute took shape

Darby joined Tea Shop Productions in 2019, according to the complaint, when the company was still finding its footing, and eventually became one of three in-house producers alongside Harris and Lane. In 2024 the three struck an arrangement, described in the suit, that gave Darby a one-third net-profit stake in the films she led as producer, along with visibility into the collection accounts that studios use to track a title's earnings through distribution. Obsession became the arrangement's first real test. The complaint alleges that Barker's original cut of the film was taken out of his hands during post-production, and that Darby stepped in to restore his editorial control and push for reshoots that addressed problems with the footage — changes she says materially improved the finished film ahead of its Toronto premiere.

Once Obsession became a hit, the complaint alleges, the arrangement broke down. Darby says she was not invited to the film's Los Angeles premiere, was cut off from the financial records she had been promised, and was told by Lane that future payments would be determined "where we feel appropriate." She also alleges Harris and Lane proposed new consulting and first-look agreements that would have eliminated her ongoing profit participation altogether, and that they informed her Obsession specifically would be the one film on which she received no continuing share. The complaint characterizes the pattern as seven years of unequal treatment between the two male founders and their younger female producing partner. It seeks an accounting not just for Obsession but across nine other Tea Shop titles, including A Banquet, Bull, The Wasp, The Cut, Into the Deep, Tornado and The Surfer.

Who is affected

The dispute turns in part on a distinction the film industry treats as consequential but that audiences rarely notice: the difference between an "executive producer" credit and functioning, in a company's internal accounting, as a lead producer. The Producers Guild of America's code of credits exists precisely because that gap has generated disputes for decades, restricting its own "Producer's Mark" designation to those who performed a defined slate of producing functions regardless of the credit a studio ultimately prints on screen. Darby's complaint leans on that gap, arguing that whatever her onscreen title, she did the work — and bore the internal responsibility — of a lead producer on Obsession.

Beyond the named parties, the case is being watched as a test of how profit-sharing holds up when a microbudget film wildly outperforms every financial assumption baked into its original deal terms. Tea Shop's roster of other low-budget genre titles gives the litigation a wider footprint than a single film, since Darby's request for an accounting reaches nine additional projects. Focus Features and its parent, Comcast-owned NBCUniversal, are not named as defendants and are not accused of wrongdoing, though the studio's $16.2 million Toronto acquisition is the transaction that set the profit pool now in dispute in motion.

Reaction, and what happens next

Darby's attorney, Thomas K. Richards, a partner at the firm Singh, Singh and Trauben, said in a statement reported by Yahoo Entertainment that the case was built on solid ground.

"Ms. Darby has brought serious and substantial claims, supported by a detailed factual record," Richards said, adding that "she is confident in her case and intends to pursue it fully."

Tea Shop Productions, Harris, Lane and Barker have not publicly responded to the allegations. Multiple outlets, including the Hollywood Reporter, reported that the company declined or did not return requests for comment this week.

Darby has demanded a jury trial, and no hearing date had been set as of this week. The case now enters the discovery phase, in which Tea Shop would likely be compelled to turn over the collection-account statements and internal correspondence the complaint says Darby was denied — records that would determine whether her version of the 2024 agreement holds up against whatever documentation the company produces in its defense. Because the suit reaches beyond Obsession to nine other Tea Shop productions, any settlement or judgment could reshape compensation arrangements across the company's slate, not just its highest earner. For an independent film sector increasingly built on small bets that occasionally pay off enormously, the case is likely to be read as an early marker of how those windfalls get divided when the people who made a film successful were not the ones who structured its deal.