With ‘Sinners,’ White Hollywood Is Moving Goalposts on Black Cinema Again
Ryan Coogler's Black vampire epic topped the box office in its opening weekend, but some in the media wanted to focus on whether the film would make a profit. WTF?
This Easter weekend, Ryan Coogler’s Black vampire epic Sinners rose past projected box office placement and earnings to open at No. 1 with $48 million domestically and $63 million worldwide in ticket sales. While this is the biggest opening weekend for an original film since 2019 — an encouraging sign that audiences will show up to the movies for an original story if it’s a cinematic event — white Hollywood media just couldn’t let a Black director have his well-deserved flowers.
“Sinners Overperformed at the Box Office, But Only Made $60 million,” said Business Insider.
“Sinners Is a Box Office Success (with a Big Asterisk),” wrote the New York Times.
“The Warner Bros. release has a $90 million price tag before global marketing expenses, so profitability remains a ways away,” tweeted Variety.
The outcry from Black audiences — and Ben Stiller — was swift.
“In what universe does a 60 million dollar opening for an original studio movie warrant this headline?” Stiller quote tweeted Variety, which earned more than 300,000 likes.
Everyone in Hollywood knows this is not usually how the media discusses these achievements, particularly for a film that garnered a 98% Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score and a 97% audience score and the first-ever A CinemaScore for a horror film. If there’s any doubt about the fact that this framing of “non-profitability” on opening weekend is blatantly anti-Black racism, compare it to the headlines for Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. That 2019 film also had a $90 million budget (which, adjusted for 2025 inflation would be well over $112 million), pulled in less than Sinners’ $48 million domestic haul with a $41 million domestic opening, and it didn’t even hit No. 1 at the box office, falling behind its Disney live-action remake competitor, The Lion King.
“Disney’s The Lion King might still rule everything the light touches, but Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood certainly held its own this weekend at the domestic box office,” wrote Variety’s Rebecca Rubin, the same author of the Sinners piece. Rubin went on to praise the second-place, B CinemaScore film as a “win for original content.” Though the film’s $90 million budget is mentioned, there’s neither a hem nor a haw about how far away the film was from being “profitable” in its opening weekend — just celebration for setting a personal opening weekend record for Tarantino. Qwhite the difference.
And with all this white media hand-wringing about “profitability,” one has to ask: profitable for whom? After a bidding war, in a near-unprecedented deal with Warner Bros. for his Black Southern horror opus, Coogler secured first-dollar gross for himself and his Proximity Media production company. That means Coogler doesn’t have to wait for Warner Bros. to make back its $90 million plus marketing budget expenses before he gains a profit. He starts earning with the first dollar Sinners made in its Thursday night previews last week.
So what’s the truth?
At the root of the white Hollywood crashout is another history-making achievement for Coogler. In addition to Warner Bros. giving him the budget he needed to shoot simultaneously on historic IMAX and 65mm film and giving him final cut, Coogler also negotiated that the ownership of Sinners’ copyright would revert back to him in 25 years.
“Hollywood Execs Fear Ryan Coogler’s Sinners Deal ‘Could End the Studio System,’” read the Vulture headline, as anonymous studio executives decried the “very dangerous” precedent. But a white man had a near-identical deal with Sony not too long ago without all of this catastrophizing in the media about it, and I’ll give you one guess who it was.
Quentin Tarantino for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
None of this is new. White media — from its Hollywood studios to its propaganda journalism arm — have always conspired to spin the narrative and move the goalposts about Black films, Black filmmakers and their successes. Whether its USA Today calling The Best Man Holiday a “race-themed film” and expressing shock that it nearly beat out Marvel movie Thor on its opening night or similarly labeling its $30 million opening weekend, like Sinners, as “overperforming,” white media has always sought to undermine financial wins or paint them as unrepeatable anomalies that should be individually studied.
“What does it take for people in Hollywood to realize Black audiences will come out to see a movie?” Lee Daniels asked in a 2013 interview with The Los Angeles Times. “Does ‘The Butler’ need to make $100 million?” The film went on to win a worldwide box office total of $177.3 million. It has not changed a thing for how Black films and filmmakers have been received or championed as a whole.
In response to white folks underestimating the Sinners box office, Black folks (who make up 13% of the U.S. population) showed up at 49% on opening night, leading to the film’s incredible success. As soon as white media played in Coogler’s face after his success, countless Black folk on social media declared that we must go back to the theaters and “prove them wrong again!” Again. Aren’t we tired?
As someone who has literally seen this film on every big screen near me five times, wrote a deep dive on the themes of the film and has made talking about its genius and its flaws my whole personality for the past week — enough is enough.
Last year, conservative consulting firm McKinsey released a report that Hollywood studio executives leave $10 billion on the table every year by not investing in Black stories. That’s right, the same studios that cry about “profitability” and enact mass layoffs as their executives pocket tens of millions in salaries and bonuses, shrug off the near-assured additional profit of $10 billion. Why? Because they’re racist.
There will never be a high-enough opening weekend or a diverse enough audience or history-making achievements to change their mind about us. There will always be one more thing. It’s time to accept their anti-Black racism for what it is: a distraction.
Let’s lock in on what matters: creating art that we like and supporting art because we like it — not because we believe one Black person’s success will equal Black success in general or that Hollywood will let it trickle down to the rest of us. It won’t. This industry must be dismantled, not begged. And if Coogler’s studio deal is what finally sets the house on fire — good. Let the mothafucka burn.
 | A guest post by
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As always, you ate this up. I love reading your words.
As a black filmmaker, its infuriating to watch them try to throw a wet blanket over the fire that is "Sinners." And knowing how studios work, I know why. They don't want other black filmmakers to be emboldened enough to follow in Ryan's footsteps. His deal has the power to change the way the industry funds films, and opens a pathway to ownership. They need to dampen it, disparage it...and it makes me livid.