'It doesn't stick to the rules': The reason Sinners has become a true box-office sensation
Warner BrosAfter great reviews and buzz, Ryan Coogler's vampire film had an extraordinary second weekend at the box office. It's a victory for a wholly original big-budget film in a cinema landscape dominated by familiar franchises.
In less than a fortnight since it was released, Sinners has already made more money at the US box office than Disney's Snow White. Could Ryan Coogler's vampire film go on to overtake two more of this year's Disney hits, Mufasa: The Lion King and Captain America: Brave New World? It's definitely possible. The Hollywood Reporter calls Sinners a "rule-defying" proposition that "continues to defy all the odds", because it was almost as lucrative in its second weekend in US cinemas as it was in its first, earning $45m (£34m) against its opening $48m (£36m). "Put another way, Sinners boasts the smallest second-weekend decline for any film opening north of $40m since 2009's Avatar and the smallest ever for an R-rated horror title," says the article. Meanwhile The Wrap predicts that it will be "the highest-grossing original live-action film in the US since Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity in 2013". Its current worldwide box office total stands at $161m (£120m), against a $90m (£67m) budget, and it likely has a long distance left to run. Sinners is a winner – just a week after a sceptical article by Variety sniffed that "profitability remains a question mark".
Perhaps this shouldn't come as a shock. The director of Creed and the Black Panther films, Coogler is adept at taking familiar Hollywood genres (sports drama, superhero blockbuster) and putting his own distinctive-yet-crowd-pleasing stamp on them. But he has gone a step further than usual this time. Featuring Michael B Jordan as a pair of twins defending their juke joint from vampires, Sinners is a horror film – but it's also a blues musical, a gangster thriller and a deeply-researched period drama about Mississippi in the 1930s. It doesn't stick to the rules of one particular genre, and it isn't based on existing intellectual property (IP), so audiences don't come to it knowing how it's all going to play out. Thanks also to some carefully-vague trailers, viewers get to discover the story for themselves – which is an increasingly rare treat. Reviewing a new Hollywood film often comes down to answering one question: "Is it slightly better or slightly worse than every other Marvel/ DC/ Star Wars/ Alien /Jurassic World/ King Kong film I've seen?" But Sinners is idiosyncratic enough to prompt other questions, which may explain its box office momentum, as word-of-mouth has spread.
This unorthodox quality is a sign of the freedom that Coogler felt when he was making it. All of his previous films were adapted from other material – or from true events, in the case of his debut, Fruitvale Station – but he told The Atlantic that with Sinners, he didn't want to use IP as "something to hide behind". He wanted to make the most personal film he could – a "love letter" to a late uncle from Mississippi – and that meant a film which didn't follow conventions.
In some ways it could be filed alongside two other films with "must-see" and "must-talk-about" appeal, 2024's The Substance and 2023's Saltburn. Sinners is a far bigger commercial success than they were, but each offer transgressive, sexually charged, gore-smeared excitement, none of them is based on a superhero comic, a video game or an earlier film, and each expresses the vision of a writer-director being allowed to do their own thing. (And their titles all begin with S, but that could be a coincidence.) The fact that it is so tricky to say which genre they belong to is a key factor. Is The Substance primarily a body-horror film or a Hollywood satire? Is Saltburn a crime thriller or a class comedy? All of these films stir different ingredients together to cook something unexpected. As Coogler put it to The Atlantic: "I wanted it to feel like you were reading Salem's Lot while listening to the best blues record, eating a bowl of spicy gumbo."
That could be why, anecdotes suggest, many people are already paying to see Sinners more than once. Because it isn't a generic, IP-based exercise, they know that they're going to discover more on a second viewing. And they know that they're going to have a good time while they're doing it. Maybe if they go for third and fourth viewings, too, Hollywood might decide that original, auteur-driven, big-budget films shouldn't be quite as rare in the cinema landscape as they are today.
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