Ryan Coogler’s critically acclaimed horror blockbuster had people talking all year, proving industry naysayers wrong and breaking various records It was the film that was supposed to destroy Hollywood: a vampire horror about life and times in the Jim Crow south peopled by a majority Black cast, and shot on Imax 70mm. Ryan Coogler, the acclaimed director who rose to prominence steering Marvel’s colossal Black Panther franchise, was thought to be out of his depth for trying to midwife a script he himself said he cobbled together in two months. Warner Bros, the studio fronting the film’s near $100m budget, was supposedly out of its mind for not only throwing that much money behind the project, but further agreeing to singularly favorable authorship deal terms that gave him control over the film’ final cut and full rights over the film after 25 years. Hollywood machers were convinced the film would never make money and that Warner Bros’ big gamble “ could be the end of the studio system ”. But Sinners never let that cynicism in. Sinners landed in theaters on Easter weekend and delivered its own miracle resurrection, racing to a $368m gate on the way to becoming the highest grossing original film in the past 15 years, and the 10th-highest domestic-grossing R-rated film of all time. (That’s right: higher than Terminator 2 and the Hangovers.) At a time when Black heritage and culture are once again under intense political assault, Sinners provoked zeitgeist-y discourse around Black history, cultural erasure and entertainment industry politics. And the online memes poking fun at juke-joint scenes hit as hard as the thinkpieces unpacking the venue’s under-appreciated contributions to the American musical canon. Continue reading...