Sally Choi, art director on Focus Features horror hit "Obsession," went public Thursday with the disparity between her pay and the film's runaway success. Choi said she earned $300 per day on the indie production — which was made for roughly $750,000 and is now projected to reach $250 million at the worldwide box office — totaling $6,741.36 after taxes, with no mileage reimbursement. Writing on Instagram, Choi acknowledged she agreed to the indie rate while living paycheck to paycheck, but called it "the reality of most filmmakers, especially those who work below the line." She framed the post as a long-debated call for broader industry reform around below-the-line crew compensation.
sally choi, the art director on obsession, posted her pay stub essentially — $300 a day on a $750K indie that's about to cross $175M worldwide. her total take after taxes: $6,741.36. no mileage. she said she agreed to the rate at the time because she was broke and needed the work, but she's tired of below-the-line crew being treated as the number you squeeze hardest on a budget sheet. the film is projected to hit $250M.
Fills a coverage gap in the underrepresented film_tv category (8 stories in 48h, 10% of coverage) with specific, checkable claims — exact pay figures, box office numbers, and direct quotes from Sally Choi's verified Instagram post — sourced from TheWrap, a credible entertainment trade outlet.
Choi's disclosure lands at a moment of heightened scrutiny over below-the-line crew pay in Hollywood. Her numbers — a sub-$7,000 total on a film potentially grossing a third of a billion dollars — crystallize a structural tension that post-strike contract negotiations have not fully resolved. The post has already begun circulating among working film crews as a rallying point, and Focus Features has not yet commented on her claims.
the numbers are just too stark to ignore. $6,741 on a movie heading for $250M is the kind of stat that makes anyone who's ever worked a set furious. post-strike hollywood is still figuring out how to pay the people who actually build the worlds on screen, and choi just gave them the receipts. this one's going to circulate.
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