Apr 23, 2025 5:49 PM
Ryan Coogler’s horror movie has shattered box office records—and the myth that audiences don’t care about original stories.
Still from Sinners.Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Kyle Brett had a feeling Sinners, the new supernatural horror from Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, would have a big opening weekend—but he was also hyper aware of the consequences of failure.
“It’s already extremely hard to have a successful original horror movie or just any original movie,” Brett, a former Netflix lawyer who currently works as a creative executive at Blumhouse, the production company behind M3GAN, Get Out, and the Insidious franchise, tells WIRED. “If that shit had bombed, original film would have truly gone away.”
The night before its US release, Brett predicted on X that Sinners would clear $60 million, based “on nothing but the number of Black folks who have asked me about it.” In the business of Hollywood, nothing is guaranteed, least of all a hit movie that’s based on an untested story. But not only was Sinners a hit, breaking multiple box office records, it’s becoming a full-on cultural phenomenon, complete with memes and literary deep dives.
Perhaps most importantly, it has challenged what’s become conventional wisdom in show business: the idea that audiences won’t respond to original stories.
Sinners has almost everything you could possibly want out of an original film: sex, vampires, a haunting score by composer Ludwig Göransson, and Michael B. Jordan in maybe his best performance yet. The movie opens in Jim Crow-era Mississippi during 1932, and follows identical twin brothers Smoke and Stack, both played by Jordan, who have returned home after time away in Chicago, where they moonlighted as gangsters for Al Capone. They’ve come back to start a juke joint but are put to the test when a coven of vampires encroaches on their new business. Across its two-hour-plus run time, what unfolds is classic Coogler: a lush, complex story about family, community, and survival that dares to reinvent the horror genre into something new altogether.
The premise has resonated with audiences in such a powerful way that Sinners opened with $48 million domestically and $63.5 million globally, making it the biggest debut for an original film since 2019, when Jordan Peele’s Us opened to $70 million (the anticipation surrounding a new Coogler project likely also played a role). Sinners likewise surpassed Nope, also by Peele—which pulled in $44 million its first weekend in 2022—as the biggest opening for an original film since the pandemic began. It is now the only horror flick in over 35 years to receive an “A” on CinemaScore.
“IPs are a comfortable, safe bet, but originals, when you have something that right out the gate can connect with audiences, they can have as big a punch,” says Daniel Loria, an analyst at The BoxOffice Company. “That’s definitely what we’re seeing.”
It can still be hard to pinpoint exactly what kind of movie works best in Hollywood these days. The success of big-budget blockbusters—Dune, Barbie and Wicked—aren’t exactly a litmus test of how well the industry is faring, or what audiences are ultimately satisfied with. Certain IP, like The New Mutants from 2020, bomb or never take off for a number of reasons; often it has to do with earnings, but poor reviews and studio mismanagement can also be a factor.
“Some franchises are past their best and haven’t performed. This happens every decade or so, which means the studios are looking at new franchise stories to take forward,” says David Hancock, an analyst at Omdia. “A Quiet Place did this. Minecraft may do it.”
Minecraft, a Warner Bros property, currently holds the top spot at the worldwide box office, with $720 million and is estimated to top one billion. Video game IP is especially hot right now. The Super Mario Bros Movie, released by Universal Pictures in 2023, topped $1.3 billion. Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog has yielded major dividends for the studio. Until Dawn and Mortal Kombat 2 are also slated to drop this year.
One of the things Sinners got right, Brett says, “is that they treated themselves like they were IP.” That means, per his agreement with Warner Bros, Coogler gets the rights to his film back in 25 years—the type of deal that’s mostly unheard of today. Some studio executives believe it sets a “very dangerous precedent” for copyright ownership and distribution entitlements, Vulture reported, saying it will crater the current power dynamics of the studio system, “effectively imperiling the cinematic back catalogue: the core asset behind all movie-studio valuation.” But “that’s the kind of attitude you need with an original,” Brett says. “It’s like, No, this is my intellectual property.”
For a time, Marvel epics were a proven seat filler, but the fatigue and declining critical reception around superhero movies that has bubbled up in recent years—a consequence of Marvel flooding the market with comic book IP—means that is no longer the case. Marvel is currently in rebound mode. It dropped Jonathan Majors, who was a rising star in the MCU, in light of his domestic assault case (he was found guilty of two out of four charges) and The Marvels became the studio’s lowest-grossing film across its 33 titles, earning $206 million globally, well below its $374 million budget.
It’s “hard to reinvent that form and I think this next generation is looking for ways to tell their own stories that service their own sort of collective ADHD,” Avengers: Endgame co-director Joe Russo told GamesRadar+ last year, likening young moviegoers’ communication style to “memes and headlines.”
Not all original films are seeing a huge demand, as the age of streamers has reshaped consumption habits. As of March, movie sales in the US and Canada were down 7 percent this year compared to the same period in 2024, according to Comscore.
In a recent interview with The Independent, director Steven Soderbergh bemoaned that very reality. His latest feature Black Bag, a spy thriller starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender that was released in theaters last month, has yet to turn a profit; it pulled in $37 million worldwide on a budget of $50 million. “This is the kind of film I made my career on,” Soderbergh said in the interview. “And if a mid-level budget, star-driven movie can’t seem to get people over the age of 25 years old to come out to theatres—if that’s truly a dead zone—then that’s not a good thing for movies. What’s gonna happen to the person behind me who wants to make this kind of film?”
Still, the success of Sinners offers a beacon of hope. It’s currently on track to have a second weekend increase, which “would be much more impressive for a non-IP April release,” Erik Anderson, the founder of Awards Watch, noted on X. It also belongs to a cohort of original films, many centered around identity, from directors that have also found audiences, commercial appeal, and critical acclaim in recent years, including Celine Song’s Past Lives, Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, Lawrence Lamont’s One of Them Days, and Sean Baker’s Anora, which won Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards.
Hancock predicts the “next decade will see a return to original stories” as a bid to bring in a wider range of audiences.
But the takeaway from Sinners and other movies like it go beyond just IP fatigue, says Brett, noting these films—and their unique audiences—need to be adequately marketed and prioritized.
“If there is anything Hollywood misses it’s how much Black audiences will continually engage with them,” he says. “It’s not just like this one-time customer type of thing. People will return to Sinners. The excitement of it, to me, shows that it has a long shelf life.”
