How Ryan Coogler’s Proximity Media became Hollywood’s most innovative—and bankable—company
Usually, all-nighters are for college students and people worried about losing their jobs if they don’t deliver. And if there’s one thing that Ryan Coogler—writer, director, and producer of Sinners—has demonstrated over his career, it’s that he delivers.
Yet on this February afternoon—a day before his blood-soaked Southern Gothic blockbuster would become the most Oscar-nominated project in cinema history—he’s sitting across from me in a knit monochrome tracksuit and thick-rimmed glasses, looking rather sleepy.
“My bad, bro,” he tells me after briefly losing his train of thought in the middle of a sentence. “I just pulled an all-nighter trying to get a draft in.”
The script is for an upcoming TV reboot of the hit 1990s series The X Files, which Ryan is coproducing for Disney+ through Proximity Media, the company he founded with his wife, producer Zinzi Coogler, and producer and screenwriter Sev Ohanian (no relation to Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian). I’m meeting with the three of them at a hotel suite in the Bay Area, where Ryan and Zinzi live, amid a punishing awards-season schedule. Ryan could be forgiven by his partners if a draft were a few days late, but Proximity runs on this kind of commitment. As Zinzi says as she sips her decaf coffee, the founders are basically family, and “you treat your family a little bit differently because you’re invested in a different way.”
Though the three have been working together since Ryan and Ohanian’s student days at the University of Southern California’s School for Cinematic Arts, they didn’t officially found Proximity until 2018, following Ryan’s catalytic success as the writer and director of Fruitvale Station, Creed, and Black Panther. Since then, the company has grown to some 20 people who work across its film, television, audio, music, and unscripted divisions. Proximity has produced a handful of feature films (Judas and the Black Messiah, Creed III), documentaries, and television shows. Sinners, which ended up taking home four Oscars, including for best screenplay and best actor (Michael B. Jordan), is its first feature film written and directed by Ryan himself.
Inspired by the imagery and iconography of the Delta blues, the movie is a meditation on Southern Black culture and the exploitative foundations of the plantation system. It’s culturally specific enough to inspire think pieces and podcast interviews. But it’s also a good old-fashioned vampire horror flick, filmed on IMAX and Panavision to maximum effect. The movie surpassed $350 million in global box office on a $90 million budget, establishing Proximity as a heavyweight. What’s more, the production company secured a head-turning deal with Warner Bros., which financed and distributed the film, reportedly giving Proximity full creative control, first-dollar gross, and rights to the intellectual property after 25 years. (The Proximity team declined to discuss the deal, saying it was never meant to be public knowledge.)
The rights-reversion part of the deal became a flashpoint for other studio executives, though, some of whom speculated that such deals could mean the end of the studio system. Those fears may be overblown: Quentin Tarantino struck a similar rights-reversion deal for his 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; studios have yet to collapse. And Ryan remains one of the surest bets in town. Measured by both critical reception and box office, the 39-year-old is the most successful director across his first five films since Steven Spielberg. Ryan’s films have grossed an estimated $2.7 billion globally and hold an aggregated Metacritic score of 81.2, surpassing the first five movies of Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, and James Cameron.
Proximity’s achievements come at a time when theatrical releases are under increasing threat. Summer 2025 saw the lowest box-office numbers since 1981 (adjusted for inflation and excluding the pandemic years). In the age of streaming and short-form video, getting audiences into movie theaters for something other than a franchise is no small feat. But with Sinners, Proximity found a way to create not just a film but a genuine event.
The movie weaves Black history, musical history, and cinematic history into something that feels very close to an epic—one that’s entirely original, not tied to a comic book, superhero, toy line, or another film. Just as notably, Proximity engineered a release strategy that treated originality itself as the product, building anticipation across mediums. The company, which controls the content around its releases to an unusual degree, added even more energy to the film by producing a series of behind-the-scenes podcast episodes around it. Meanwhile, its in-house music division, a rarity among independent studios, came out with a hit soundtrack, cementing the film as a musical phenomenon.
“It earned its success the hard way,” Pamela Abdy and Michael De Luca, co-chairs and CEOs of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, said in an emailed statement. “The film serves as a reminder that originality is rarely the safest path, but it can be the most rewarding.” In a moment when Hollywood is questioning what brings people out of their homes, Proximity offers a clear, quietly radical answer.
Like many teenagers, Ryan and Zinzi Coogler spent their first date at a movie theater: the Regal Cinema in Oakland’s Jack London Square, where they saw Bring It On. They were 14 and dreaming of athletic superstardom—Ryan in football, Zinzi in middle-distance track. In some sense, their working relationship began almost as soon as they met. They trained together through high school to keep each other motivated. But it was movies that became the centerpiece of many future dates—and defined their lives.
Zinzi attended Fresno State; Ryan went to St. Mary’s College of California, then to Sacramento State. A creative writing professor at St. Mary’s had told Ryan that he should consider screenwriting. He learned that USC was the place to be and entered the MFA program in 2008. By then, Zinzi was working as an ASL interpreter, but would visit him on campus, sitting in on film classes and serving as script supervisor, producer, and even cinematographer and camera operator on his student projects. The result was so good that one of Ryan’s professors arranged for him to meet with Forest Whitaker’s production company, citing the expert camera work. That led to Whitaker helping to produce Ryan’s first feature, 2013’s Fruitvale Station.
At USC, Ryan and Zinzi got to know Ohanian, an astute and mild-mannered former Boy Scout from Glendale, California. Ohanian was already a self-taught filmmaker. In the early days of YouTube, he had written and directed a scripted series that mined his Armenian family for humor. When the videos went viral across the diaspora, he raised money from the Armenian community to shoot a feature-length film with the same characters. He screened it at community centers, churches, and schools, realizing that people show up when you give them something to care about. After USC, he gravitated toward producing, a job he sums up as “making the impossible possible.”
The seed for Proximity came from a conversation the three had over lunch during the San Francisco Film Festival in 2018. Ryan and Zinzi were basking in the success of Black Panther, and Ohanian was in town to support the thriller Searching, which he co-wrote and produced. They floated the idea of forming a company, Ryan as creative lead, Zinzi and Ohanian as producers. In their time in Hollywood, they’d noticed there was a pattern to the nonfranchise films that performed well at the box office.
“What we were finding was that every quarter, there was a movie that would beat tracking,” Ryan says, referring to the test-screening scores studios use to gauge wider interest in a film. “People would say, ‘Man, we never saw this coming.’ Get Out is a great example. Crazy Rich Asians is another.” Even Hustlers, Ryan points out, exceeded financial expectations. But Proximity’s founders believe that the success of these films should have been predictable, largely because they have multiple “hooks,” something they talk about frequently. In the case of Hustlers, there’s Jennifer Lopez, con artists and criminals, and Cardi B in a strip club.
“These movies made popcorn money,” Ryan says, “but there was still something sticky there, something that challenges you or brings you closer. So we started to wonder if maybe this could be our lane.”
Proximity aims to build a business on films that deliver, as Ryan says, “real, potent artistic points of view,” while also giving audiences reasons to leave their homes. For Sinners, those hooks are vampires, IMAX, and Michael B. Jordan playing twins.
There’s a word heard often among Proximity’s founders, who named their company for its mission to bring audiences closer to often-overlooked subjects: eventizing. Ohanian is so committed to this idea that he once tried to create a formula for turning a movie into an event. “Disclaimer,” he warns, “I don’t even know if it’s possible to reverse engineer, but I came up with this ridiculous acronym called PUGS: propulsive, unique, genre-bending, and surprising.” Ohanian may be a better film producer than a creator of acronyms, but Sinners is evidence that he’s onto something.
For Proximity’s founders, who learned to love movies alongside family, friends, and community, generating mass appeal is a matter of responsibility. “Sixteen-year-old Zinzi, Sev, and Ryan didn’t know what an art house theater was,” Zinzi recalls, “but we did know what the multiplex was. There are so many people whose entry point to this medium is through the multiplex. That’s inspired us to be broader in scope, but very specific with intention.”
In the hotel room, Ryan, Zinzi, and Ohanian are reminiscing about the heyday of the movie soundtrack, listing the ones that impacted them the most: Titanic, Space Jam, Above the Rim, Waiting to Exhale, The Bodyguard.
“Did I already say The Bodyguard?” Ryan says with a laugh. “Well, screw it, I’m going to say it again!”
Now all around 40 years old, they remember a time when the soundtrack was a bridge between the theater experience and your life. You’d listen to your favorite TLC or Tupac track in your bedroom while you looked at the CD cover and replayed scenes from the movie in your mind.
To bring that experience to modern audiences, Proximity has an in-house music division, which creates and releases soundtracks for its projects. The Sinners soundtrack, which includes songs from nearly two dozen contemporary blues, folk, and country artists, hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Blues Albums list and took home a pair of Grammys. Proximity’s Wakanda Forever soundtrack, released in 2022, peaked at a respectable No. 12 on the Billboard 200 list. (Though Ryan directed the Black Panther follow-up for Marvel Studios and Disney, Proximity handled the music.) Perhaps more impressively, it provided listeners with Rihanna’s first hit since 2017: the power ballad “Lift Me Up,” which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Both projects were overseen by Ludwig Göransson, a soft-spoken Swede who runs Proximity’s music division and who has also known Coogler since USC. A graduate of the school’s Screen Scoring program, he remains a soundtrack composer of the traditional variety. He takes his orchestral arranging and composing work seriously enough that he traveled to Mexico City and Lagos, Nigeria, to find musicians for the Wakanda Forever soundtrack. For Sinners, he and Ryan road-tripped through the Mississippi Delta to Memphis to immerse themselves in the blues and, during filming, in New Orleans, he rented a church turned studio to record the score while on set. The resulting soundtrack won two Grammys and the Oscar for best original score.
But unlike a traditional composer, Göransson is also a bona fide hitmaker who has worked with the likes of Adele and Haim. He met Donald Glover (aka Childish Gambino) while writing music for the TV show Community and produced three albums with the artist, as well as the viral (and seemingly forever-relevant) song “This Is America,” which netted Göransson Grammys for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. “He exists in the film-scoring space,” says Coogler, “but at any given time, he’s also trying to make a hit record with somebody.”
That Proximity has a music division is notable. (Perhaps even influential: Indie hitmaker A24 launched a music division in 2025.) But for Göransson, it’s a no-brainer. “Music is at the core of our communication,” he says. “We want to make sure we have control.”
With that control, Proximity can create an ecosystem of content around its IP, well beyond music. The company’s unscripted division released a limited series in 2023 about Göransson’s development of the Wakanda Forever score. And the company teases out spin-offs from nonmusical projects as well. For the Shaka King–directed Judas and the Black Messiah, which nabbed Oscars for Best Supporting Actor and Best Original Song, the company’s podcasting arm produced a show discussing the film’s dramatized version of the death of Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton and what really happened that winter of 1969.
Paola Mardo, a veteran of Sony Entertainment, has run Proximity’s audio division since 2022. In that capacity, she oversees a weekly podcast, In Proximity, that focuses on stories behind the camera, especially the artistry of everyday people. Indeed, one of the most popular episodes features a 40-minute interview with Steve Gehrke, the Hawaiian-shirt-clad script supervisor for Sinners, who talked about why he still takes notes with a pencil and pad. For a Sinners-related series, the podcast team also recorded conversations with Göransson, cultural consultant Dolly Li (who helped the filmmakers understand the role of Chinese immigrants in 1930s Mississippi), and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who discussed shooting for IMAX for the first time. At this year’s Academy Awards, Durald Arkapaw became the first woman to take home the prize for cinematography, for her work on Sinners.
These interviews highlight one of the keys to Proximity’s ability to make such quality work. Ryan has “these longitudinal relationships,” says Franklin Leonard, film producer and founder of the industry platform the Black List. “He finds his people, and they continue to build together.” Durald Arkapaw had also worked on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. As had Sinners’ costume designer, Ruth Carter, and production designer, Hannah Beachler.
Leonard notes, almost as an aside, that many of these collaborators are people of color, something he believes isn’t diversity for diversity’s sake. “Much of [Ryan’s] work is talked about in terms of diversity, but I think that’s a disrespect to him. Yes, he works with a Black production designer, but there’s a real meritocracy there,” he says. “They’re the best people at what they do.”
In addition to the Oscar nods for Ryan’s script and direction, Sinners received nominations for casting, editing, production design, costume, cinematography, makeup and hair, sound, VFX, Original Score, and Original Song. Indeed, every eligible department head on set was nominated.
A year after Sinners’ release, the industry is watching to see what Proximity does with its success. “Are you going to become a major [studio] looking for financing to launch a production outfit?” wonders Sean McNulty, industry analyst and author of the newsletter The Wakeup. “Or are you going to be just the home for Ryan Coogler and some associated stuff?”
Proximity, which is self-funded, seems committed to its independent approach: Sell the movie to a big distributor, make the money, sell another movie. It’s a viable plan, McNulty says. “Theatrical is still a vibrant business.” And studios are still deeply invested in it—60 million views on Netflix is worth a great deal less to a studio than 60 million tickets sold. Plus, says McNulty, there’s another reason to feel bullish on Proximity: “I have a hard time betting against Ryan Coogler.”
In the next few months, Ryan will direct the pilot for Proximity’s much-anticipated X-Files reboot. Later, he’ll head into production for Disney’s Black Panther III. Other Proximity projects on deck include Southern Bastards, a Hulu series based on the graphic novel of the same name, helmed by showrunner Matt Olmstead; a spy thriller film from Searching director Aneesh Chaganty; and “a series built on a singular comedic voice,” Ohanian says cryptically.
Not every Proximity film with another director has been a clear box-office success. While the Michael B. Jordan–directed Creed III earned more than $276 million worldwide, Judas and the Black Messiah took in less than $8 million. To be fair, its real box-office power remains unknown: Judas’s release was postponed by the onset of COVID, and Warner Bros. took the unusual step of streaming it on HBO Max for about a month before its exclusive theatrical window.
Proximity, however, is confident that films and shows featuring populations Hollywood has historically treated as “niche” can perform well with broader audiences, even overseas. The Ohanian-produced Searching, the first mainstream American thriller with an Asian American lead, cleared $75 million at the box office on a reported $880,000 production budget. Sinners, a film in which the only white characters are vampires or Klansmen, performed surprisingly well with white audiences and garnered a respectable $88 million in international ticket sales. McNulty believes that number could have been higher: “I think Warner Bros. undermarketed it [internationally].”
If there’s one thing that ties all of Proximity’s projects together, it’s a profound respect for audiences. It goes back all the way to Coogler’s 2009 student film, Locks, for which Zinzi served as assistant director and script supervisor and Göransson composed the score. The six-minute short, set in Oakland, tracks the decision of a young man to cut his hair. That’s it. That’s the story. But in it, you can see a Proximity ethos being born while Coogler perfects the patient, observational, almost reverent eye that he used to stunning effect in Fruitvale Station, which similarly depicts a day in the life of a young Oakland man—in this case, 22-year-old Oscar Grant, who was killed by a BART police officer on New Year’s Eve 2009. Both films portray Black characters having an experience that is very much a function of race, but in a way that is instantly recognizable and emotionally relatable to nearly everyone.
In a world fatigued by conflict and isolation, this simple, principled approach might be the movie industry’s best way forward—even if it requires a few sleepless nights.
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