Over the weekend, Variety inadvertently tripped over a nest of bloodsucking hornets when it published an article calling Sinner’s explosive box office debut into question. The gist of the article was that, despite its record-breaking opening weekend, Sinners was still a financial liability thanks to director Ryan Coogler’s unique ownership agreement with the studio. The internet’s collective response was that movies with similar contracts made by white directors never face the same level of scrutiny.
We’ll probably all forget about this entire controversy by next week, while Sinners is clearly destined to become a modern horror classic. But the larger point that all this breathless box office coverage seems to raise is that, as a society, we’ve never been more obsessed with the profitability of movies — and less concerned about making actual good cinema. All that said, if those numbers matter as much as Variety and co. seem to think, then Hollywood could learn a valuable lesson from one of the most successful (and most overlooked) original films of 2024.
