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.