Ryan Coogler’s Wakanda Forever follow-up has cemented the director as a rare commercial auteur. Here’s how Sinners might defy cinema’s IP logic.
The synopsis of Sinners – Ryan Coogler’s first entirely original movie, in UK cinemas this weekend – sounds like an odd fit for a flagship Imax release.
Set in the heart of rural Mississippi in 1932, the film follows ex-military gangsters the Smokestack twins (both played by Michael B. Jordan) on a mission to convert their hometown’s old sawmill into a Juke joint. What starts as a promising night of booze, boogying and bonking is soon ruined by the arrival of three sinister folk singers with an aversion to garlic – cue an industrial quantity of fake blood and more stake-based action than Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu. It’s the stuff b-movie horror is made of.
But Sinners in its execution is far from your average b-movie. Shot on Imax cameras in the spring of 2024, the baking expanse of Louisiana cotton fields fills the screen as well – if not better – than the director’s first use of the technology on 2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. What could easily have been filmed as a cheap-as-chips chamber piece luxuriates in the kind of money and resources usually reserved for four-quadrant blockbusters. Like Oppenheimer before it, there’s a depth and confidence to Sinners that helps turn an unlikely box office draw into an undeniable cinematic event.
No small part of this is down to Coogler himself. After an unnecessarily accomplished revival of the Rocky franchise in Creed and two critically acclaimed MCU entries in Black Panther and its 2022 sequel, his four-feature filmography (rounded out by 2013 debut Fruitvale Station) has made more than $2.4bn at the box office. Having built his career, unusually, with a series of existing-IP studio blockbusters, his “one-for-them-one-for-me” ratio is certainly due a rebalance.
Still, the speed and scale of Sinners’ trip to the big screen is pretty much unheard of in modern Hollywood. Coogler pitched the idea, then without a script, to his Proximity Media partners in October 2023. Cameras were rolling on the project less than six months later.
The marketing campaign for the film has been unusually confident for a $90m original picture, too. Long leading the film with a hefty collaboration with Epic Games’ videogame juggernaut, Fortnite, Warner Bros looked to boost awareness amongst an audience non-IP projects rarely crack with much success.
In recent weeks, Coogler himself has been front-and-centre on the interview circuit far more than the film’s two-time star, Jordan. From a ten-minute video with Kodak explaining aspect ratios to an enthused tour of the projection booth of London’s BFI Imax screen, the director has been demonstrating a kind of technical attention to detail and appreciation for craft that it’s rare to find in mainstream cinema promotion.
By all accounts, it’s worked, too. Early tracking indicates the film could be looking at a $40m+ opening in North America, riding on a wave of critical acclaim and goodwill towards its star and director. Coogler seems to have firmly established himself in the same cinephile auteur space as the likes of Jordan Peele, Greta Gerwig and Robert Eggers – the kind that can take an already marketable film and turn it into a must-see on the big screen for true movie geeks. Of all Warner Bros’ original projects out in 2025, this looks like it could well be the one most likely to crack into in-cinema profitability.
It’s a fitting behind-the-scenes story for a film balancing a frightening number of tones and genres. Equal parts horror, western, period drama and, in its own way, jukebox musical, Sinners blends the old and the new on its sleeve just as the latest film technology brings new life to what could have been a very typical slasher story. Like a key scene in the film, which blends musical genres into a magnificent single shot sweep through a bustling dance floor, it’s a balance which absolutely shouldn’t work. It’s a miracle that Coogler and co have pulled it off.
