The Hit Hollywood Didn’t Want
This article appears in the December 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Once every blue or blood moon, Hollywood still manages to rally everyone around a movie. Audiences, critics, the casually curious: All submit to the gravitational pull of a multiplex sensation—no small feat in our hopelessly divided attention economy. Two years ago, it was Barbenheimer, a light-dark double feature for the ages, that captured the collective moviegoing imagination. Has any film since dominated the spotlight to quite the same extent? The closest we got to such a monocultural phenomenon in 2025 was a very different kind of IMAX spectacle: a pulpy, heady, 1930s-set thrill ride that pitted twin Mississippi gangsters against a step-dancing Irish vampire with an ear for a good melody.
Sinners was, in many of the ways that matter, the movie of 2025. Not necessarily the best movie—though you’ll find plenty happy to make that case, now that list-making season is upon us—and not quite the year’s biggest hit either. Rather, Ryan Coogler’s supersized supernatural blockbuster fused critical and commercial enthusiasm into a kind of mass obsessive fervor. It became, for a few weeks, the film everyone was talking (and raving) about, which doesn’t happen too often in the era of infinite content overload.
That’s not all that Sinners fused. The marketing campaign promised a stylish throwback creature feature from the writer-director of Creed and Black Panther. But Coogler had more on his mind than cheap thrills. This wasn’t just his flavorfully claustrophobic monster movie, but also his Prohibition-days crime picaresque, his action-packed Western, his Southern Gothic soap opera, his ensemble portrait of a Delta town under the shadow of the KKK, and even his own bluesy riff on an MGM toe-tapper, complete with numbers that span a century of Black musical expression, like the cinematic equivalent of OutKast’s “B.O.B.” Forget “best.” Sinners may well be the most movie of 2025.
Sinners is a threat to a Hollywood business model built only on regurgitation.
That excess, that genre largesse, hardly put a dent in the film’s popularity. If anything, it fed the impression of a must-see event—a Hollywood epic that really goes for it. Like the film’s messianic troubadour, the aspiring bluesman Sammie (Miles Caton), Sinners struck a chord. The “A” CinemaScore bestowed by opening-night audiences (essentially unheard of for horror movies) underscored that people were ready to embrace this singularly strange crowd-pleaser on its own terms. No other movie this year so profitably split the difference between popcorn populism and an auteur’s own idiosyncratic preoccupations. No, not even One Battle After Another, another visionary Warner Bros. entertainment topically concerned with the scourge of white nationalism.
Such a watercooler triumph is a boon for the industry at large; at a time when theatrical attendance still hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic numbers, anything driving people back to the movies has to be considered a greater good. Yet the industry response to Sinners, at least as reflected in the initial coverage of its returns, told a different story. One of the towering successes of 2025 was met with a curious skepticism from the bean counters and analysts—a rush to qualify and undercut the good news that bordered on hostility. The Monday-morning quarterbacking, which clashed hard with the glowing reviews in some of the same publications, unusually framed Coogler’s victory: Somehow, he made the giant hit that Hollywood didn’t want.
IT WAS CLEAR FROM THE END of that first weekend in April, when Sinners premiered to a robust $63.5 million worldwide, that Warner Bros. had something huge on its hands. Clear to everybody, that is, but the box office pundits reporting on its rapidly climbing tallies. “It’s a great result for an original, R-rated horror film that takes place in the 1930s,” began Variety’s equivocating write-up, before sinking the stake in: “[Y]et the Warner Bros. release has an eye-popping $90 million price tag before global marketing expenses, so profitability remains a ways away.” The article’s pessimistic dismissiveness drew baffled ire from all over. Even Ben Stiller publicly rolled his eyes.
But other publications seemed similarly intent on calling the jumbo-sized soda half full. The New York Times attached a literal asterisk to the jackpot receipts, likewise wondering aloud about the film’s long-term prospects, despite an early audience reaction that had “word of mouth” written all over it. Meanwhile, Business Insider echoed the hand-wringing about profitability. It’s very possible this angle was shaped by Warner Bros. itself. After all, early reportage promised a steep incline for Sinners, asserting that it would need to make a whopping $300 million to recoup both its $90 million budget and the marketing costs. But as an anonymous source told Vulture shortly thereafter, that number was wildly inflated. Sinners exceeded it anyway within a few short weeks.
That the movie shattered the studio’s modest projections for opening weekend is plenty telling, too. Why, exactly, were projections modest for the new film from the director-star team behind the record-breaking Creed and Black Panther franchises? “Overperformed” is the backhanded compliment often paid to movies by, for, and about Black Americans. Shortsightedness is too innocent an explanation for Hollywood’s historical tendency to underestimate these projects. It’s a pattern that supports a faulty narrative: If films with Black directors and Black stars are considered “risky,” despite all evidence to the contrary, then the industry can continue to treat them that way.
The success of Sinners is a threat to such narratives, which might be one reason publications like Variety encouraged readers to second-guess it. In a broad sense, the film’s undeniable popularity challenges all kinds of conventional wisdom about what audiences are supposed to exclusively desire these days. For one thing, it sticks out starkly in a year otherwise dominated by films designed to appeal to all ages—the video game adaptations, comic-book cinema, and live-action recycling of animated hits situated all around Sinners on the annual box office charts. Coogler’s movie is rated R in the traditional sense; it’s a popcorn movie for grown-ups. The violence and language are explicit, the themes mature. And in liberating himself from the Marvel machine, the filmmaker embraces an untrendy carnality. How often, these days, are the characters in a big-budget action movie this libidinous?
That Sinners sprang solely from Coogler’s impassioned, movie-addled imagination also makes it an outlier at a time when nearly every other hit of comparable magnitude is a sequel, remake, reimagining, or other such return to the proverbial well. In theory, that should be exciting to an industry that’s seen ample proof, these past few years, that not every IP can be milked indefinitely. Just look at the superhero factory Coogler just escaped: Marvel’s biggest success of the year, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, teeters on the narrow margin separating a hit from a flop. It cost nearly twice what Sinners did, and ended up making a hair less domestically.
There’s a clear lesson in the massive turnout for an R-rated period piece not based on something the audience already saw and loved: People crave original visions. They might even be starved for them, if the parallel lucrative runs of Weapons, F1, Materialists, and (on the streaming front) KPop Demon Hunters are any further indication. But is that a message Hollywood is ready or willing to receive? Today’s class of executives, many little more than glorified venture/vulture capitalists, have gone all in on the belief that franchises are where the money is at. So what do they do with the information that they actually aren’t the only (or even a foolproof) recipe for success? What if all their thinking on the matter is wrong? Sinners is a threat to a business model built only on regurgitation, on endless return trips to Jurassic World, on more Toy Stories and feature-length toy commercials.
I’D BE WILLING TO WAGER that at least some of the big money Sinners made in theaters rests on a single arresting image central to its marketing campaign: that electrifying shot of Michael B. Jordan, who plays the film’s twin antihero protagonists, storming right toward the camera in slow motion, firing a massive tommy gun. The scene in question is even more thrilling in context. It arrives late in the movie, after the climax, as a kind of righteous aside: Having already faced a fanged metaphor for the culture that preys on his community, Jordan’s Smoke takes aim at the very non-metaphorical Klan. You could call the set piece gratuitous (it almost feels like a separate kick-ass revenge movie stuffed into the movie’s closing minutes), but it absolutely feeds into the spirit of a film that’s all about Black Americans taking care of themselves because no one else will. It’s also about the rather wholesome pleasure of seeing murderous bigots put quite literally on blast.
Mainstream thrillers like Sinners can work as escapism: a loud distraction in an air-conditioned room, a break from the problems of your life and the world. But Coogler’s event pictures are more cathartic than that, and less removed. There’s really no way to watch this one in a vacuum. It arrives at a time when racial profiling is now judicially protected government protocol; when Black professionals are being purged from government spaces and historical record; when the president of the United States reaches for “low I.Q.” to describe any person of color who dares criticize his relentless corruption. Though set nearly a century in the past, Sinners resonates plenty with the present moment: It’s a monster movie about living in a country where the monsters are always circling, lies and empty promises on their breath, ill intentions barely concealed by their smiles. That the movie harmonizes with our present moment without letting that song drown everything out is probably another key to the spell it cast over the multiplex this spring. In that way, One Battle really is the Stack to its Smoke: a twin study in how to gracefully fold the spirit of the times into a genre-bending magnum opus.
Of course, Coogler isn’t just vaguely gesturing toward the inequities of a country built on them. Sinners is after something more specific about how white America covets and exploits Black art. What are the vampires, really, but relentless culture vultures, like the musicians and label honchos who absorbed the sounds of the blues, homogenizing it for a white audience? Coogler’s personal touch on this material is plain enough in the deep love for music running through its plump veins. More than that, though, Sinners announces itself as an allegory of Black artists fighting for ownership—of their work, of their spaces, of their futures. It’s a resonant topic for a filmmaker still navigating the challenges of making big-studio art (sometimes for Disney, no less) without surrendering your soul.
To that end, the film’s politics extend beyond the borders of every big screen that housed it, and on to the ground the director won behind the scenes. You hear about the bidding war for Sinners, how several major studios scrambled to get their hands on it, and can’t help but picture the vampires of Sinners, all vying for a vein. Except that Coogler turned that feeding frenzy in his own favor, arranging a deal that gave him points on the box office, final cut on the movie, and—in a victory as symbolically significant as it was financially savvy—full retention of rights to the film itself after 25 years. Maybe that historic coup is really what sent a chill down Hollywood’s spine. An artist having full control and ownership of their work? For a studio exec, that’s a thought much scarier than any creature of the night.
The post The Hit Hollywood Didn’t Want appeared first on The American Prospect.