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Ryan Coogler’s Sinners Splits the Difference Between Original and Classic

Updated: 6 days ago

On April 24th, 2025, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos asserted in a discussion with Time magazine editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs, which was then widely reported by Variety, that the theatrical experience was an “outdated concept,” insisting that what consumers really wanted was to watch everything at home. Because karma has a wicked sense of humor, his staunch claim fell flat mere days later in the most high-profile and embarrassing way possible, with Sinners set to earn more in its second weekend than its first. 


Three people in a dim room, one holding a gun with a focused look. Worn clothes, reddish light, tense atmosphere. Wooden beams visible. Michael B. Jordan in Sinners.
Michael B. Jordan in Sinners. (Image: Warner Bros. Pictures)

The film witnessed a mere 10% drop in the box office, a level of success truly astonishing for an original Black-led film of any kind, let alone a horror movie, which tend to drop 60% in their opening weekend anyway. For comparison, Jordan Peele’s 2018 classic, Get Out, had a drop of 20% in its second weekend, which was considered an exceptional hold at the time, as apparent by this Deadline article.


The trades, as expected, were deeply annoyed by this. Most notably, Variety published a weasley hit piece, which snivelingly tried to downplay the film’s success by pointing out its $90 million budget. This seemed to suggest that the film earning back 2/3rds of its budget in two days was somehow cause for alarm. Ben Stiller put it best when he tweeted out, “In what universe does a 60 million dollar opening for an original studio movie warrant this headline?”


Their efforts were for naught (and it was deeply satisfying to see them slink back a few days later with a series of fawning articles, including one that posits the film as 2025’s first Oscar contender). The cultural consensus couldn’t be defeated: Sinners was the movie of the moment. It shouldn’t have been nearly as much of a surprise as it was. 


Ryan Coogler has distinguished himself as one of the few mainstream directors of recent years who successfully blends mainstream appeal with genuinely entertaining films that still feel weighty and meaningful. His 2015 Rocky spin-off, Creed, is arguably the best Rocky movie, thanks in large part to how Coogler was able to tap into the same crowd-pleasing instincts that Stallone and John G. Avildsen did back in the 1970s. 


Following the success of Creed, Coogler was able to paint on a bigger canvas, which he did with Black Panther, back when making an MCU film was still somewhat prestigious. That movie’s star has dimmed somewhat in the ensuing years, as it fell victim to the now-infamous Marvel crunch problem (why did the finale look so bad? They didn’t have time to work on it properly). 


However, it cannot be denied how much that film captured the cultural zeitgeist. It occasionally feels like hype around mainstream movies is astroturfing, but Black Panther actually is the last time where that tangibly wasn’t the case. And again, it comes down to Coogler’s instincts as a storyteller. Black Panther is one of the vanishingly few MCU movies that can, with a straight face, be described as “important.”


And while I wouldn’t necessarily call Fruitvale Station, one of Coogler’s early works, “entertaining” given the subject matter, it does at least deftly avoid the common pitfalls movies can fall into when dramatizing Black suffering. The whole point of that movie is to highlight that Oscar Grant was a person, a full, flawed, three-dimensional person, and to focus on his humanity rather than the senseless crime that was committed against him.


It took me aback, looking at Ryan Coogler’s career, and realizing that Sinners is technically his first original movie. But even calling it an “original movie” isn’t quite right; though the details set it apart, at its core, this is a classic horror movie through and through, featuring one of the most classic horror monsters of all: vampires. To be clear, I mean this as a good thing. As a horror movie lover, I take particular joy that Coogler took his bag from Marvel and made a straight-up vampire flick. But on a deeper level, it’s just cool to see someone use the sturdy foundations of the vampire flick and spin it off into interesting directions. 


The film opens on a pair of Black twins, who return to their hometown with some ill-gotten gains and a plan to set up a juke joint, and by the end of the night, they’re fighting off waves of the undead. Right away, there’s a comparison that could be drawn to From Dusk Till Dawn, with the structural conceit of the first half playing out like a regular movie. The second half descends into pure vampiric carnage, although the approaches are different enough that any comparison feels like a stretch. 


From Dusk Till Dawn feels like an exercise in pure pulp, whereas Sinners is going for something weightier and mythological. Not to mention, this film casts Michael B. Jordan as both brothers, whereas From Dusk Till Dawn asks for possibly the biggest willing suspension of disbelief it can by asking us to buy Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney as brothers. 


It’s the granular details that set it apart. The vampiric hive mind is a fascinating new concept, darkly mirroring the first half’s focus on shared community and its relationship to their history. I also liked the perspective of the vamps themselves — they’re antagonistic and bloodthirsty to be sure, but they also seem genuine in their aspirations to “help” the main characters in their way. 


They’re trying to attack and kill them because they legitimately believe existing within a vampiric hive mind is for the best (they’re kind of like Star Trek’s Borg in that way; you get the sense that to them, “resistance is futile” is a promise rather than a threat). This isn’t meant to absolve them in any way — one of the horrors of Get Out is that you get the sense that the Armitages are totally sincere when they tell Chris that “[they] would’ve voted for Obama a third time.”


But like with Creed, this works because it is a classic film. Which is to say, it adheres to the priorities of moviemaking as we used to understand them before streaming upended everything — it views cinema as communal and has aspirations of grand populism. The dance sequence that serves as the film’s centerpiece is deservedly lauded, the best instance yet of his career-long interest in grounding music in culture. 


It’s a huge swing, and is refreshingly unafraid to go for big emotions. Sinners avoids the irony epidemic of contemporary cinema, where movies nowadays, mostly blockbusters, are chronically afraid of the vulnerability that comes with earnest artistic expression. Ironically, someone like Coogler, who found such success feeding the infernal Marvel machine, is now the one with the best recent antidote. 


It would be a fallacy to suggest that Sinners is such a massive success simply because it’s good. Undeserving movies are more often than not rewarded with massive box office earnings all the time — the current box office top 50 is chock full of superhero slop, live-action Disney remakes, and even a Jurassic World movie. And of course, there are the innumerable deserving movies that got shut out of the box office: Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Transformers: Age of Extinction sit comfortably on the box office top 50, but Bumblebee and Transformers One were notable disappointments, despite the almost singlehanded efforts of that one twitter hype guy.


But that’s the point — it’s impossible to algorithmically predict what’s going to be popular. My take here is that this is a huge part of why so many in the industry were so peevishly resistant to the film’s success, as it single-handedly disproves their lens for viewing art and cinema. Sinners is the quintessential people’s horror movie. I’ve seen it twice in the theater, and both times I saw the dance scene, I felt like I was levitating. But more than that, it’s a film that contests the notion that if you’re a Black director, there’s only a certain type of movie you’re “supposed” to make. Coogler’s career before this consisted of a Black-centric superhero movie, another Black-centric spinoff of a popular franchise, and a dramatization of a real-life police brutality. 


This is a patently reductionist reading of these movies. As discussed earlier, each of them subverts their potential to reflect cultural stereotypes in ingenious ways. This is certainly not to suggest there’s not a deep cultural reading to be had in Sinners. Black culture is at the heart of Sinners. However, the film doesn’t feel like it’s making a horror movie in service of a cultural point; rather, it feels like cultural analysis further enriches the film. It’s a subtle distinction, but a crucial one. 


This isn’t the way it always goes; the expectation is, if you’re a Black director, you make movies “about” intrinsically Black experiences. If you ask the average film buff what Spike Lee’s masterpieces are, they’re likely to say Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X or BlacKKKlansman. No one quite knows what to do with Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, the horror/comedy remake he made with Rami Malek. And in fairness, that’s a weird movie! But implicit in a lot of the criticism it received upon release was the underlying insinuation that it was “beneath” Lee to be making an odd duck movie about vampires, when to me, subversive maneuvers like that are what make his filmography that much richer.


Which is the point: Sinners, and Ryan Coogler’s career overall, isn’t great for reasons that can be algorithmically predicted or put in a safe and easy cultural box. It engages with heavy ideas about identity and culture, but it does so on its own terms, in its own way. It refutes easy categorization, denying us the “out” of making the vampire clan overtly racist and instead positioning them as more insidiously tempting, forcibly assimilating their victims into their own hive-mind culture. Which might be the ultimate Coogler touch: movies that look easily digestible on the surface, but which contain multitudes and nuances that thwart simple readings.


The reasons it works are not the reasons Hollywood will pick up on; I’m reminded of how, in the wake of the Barbie phenomenon, there was a slew of toy-based movies rushed into development (are they still making the Lena Dunham Polly Pocket movie?). Hollywood as an apparatus continues to be uniquely ill-suited to original movies made by auteurs, despite ostensibly being perceived as hallowed ground in cinema that seeks to foster creative freedom. Consequently, Sinners and its monumental success continue to be even more of a miracle. In a world where everything can seem algorithmic and homogenized, Sinners splits the difference between original and classic — it’s a crowdpleaser in the best sense, but it still presents its story in a way we’ve never seen before.




Edited by Anish Paranjape


Sam Stashower is a recent graduate student and a writer at Political Pandora. He has contributed film reviews and pop culture analysis to The Quindecim (Goucher College) and The Eagle (American University). A devoted media enthusiast, he can—and inevitably will—find a way to connect everything he watches, listens to, or reads back to Star Trek.


 

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