The Sinners Discourse: lessons from a box office snafu
This post first appeared on new newsletter, Future Proof. Subscribing to that allows you early access to my thoughts, as well as supporting my writing on Medium and elsewhere.
Whether Nero actually fiddled while Rome burned is a question for historians. To interrogate its veracity misunderstands the importance of metaphor, anyway. Fiddling while Rome burns has come to represent any activity deemed non-essential in a period of strong, essential necessities. But, more literally, it speaks to a prioritisiation of art over politics; music over revolution. And so, when I find myself fixated (yet again) on disputes about cinema box office figures, I feel like Nero. You will have to excuse, therefore, the apparent vapidity of this post, but however hard I try, I continue to care about the demise of cinema, the great artform of the 20th century.
The latest controversy has focused on Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s vampire movie set in 1930s Mississippi. The film — which stars Michael B. Jordan in a dual role, as dangerous bootleggers in the twilight of prohibition — has been a huge hit. Domestically (which, funnily enough, includes Canada) it has made $217,839,234 to date, putting it at №1 in the box office for the first few weeks of its release. The most impressive part of this was the 6% drop-off from opening weekend to second weekend, suggesting that positive reviews and word of mouth response were maintaining footfall. That sort of drop-off is extremely unusual for a wide-release film — and Sinners has had a massive opening, in an extremely vacant part of the cinematic calendar. So, with all of this positivity swirling, why has there been so much debate about whether Sinners can truly be considered a home run?
Much of that question revolves around a tweet (which condenses the more nuanced view of the article into a pithy line) from entertainment Bible Variety. The tweet, and the article, speculate that the marketing costs for the film left it some way off profitability, even with its first week success.
That narrative got a lot of pushback from within the industry — including from Ben Stiller, who replied “In what universe does a 60 million dollar opening for an original studio movie warrant this headline?” — and from fans of Coogler’s movie. But there are complex questions here about the modern film industry, complex rights agreements and the ever moving benchmark for what constitutes a “hit”. Hollywood tycoons are welcome to debate this themselves (and I’m sure, ultimately, it will be the views of their accountants that are taken most seriously) but I wanted to add three generalised learnings from the Sinners debate.
1. Theatrical runs are a marketing expense.
I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again. A significant reason for releasing your film in cinemas, during this streaming era, is to guarantee it more press attention than it will get if it goes straight to Netflix or Prime or wherever. A cinema release promises (here in the UK, and a similar system operates in North America) inclusion in the national press show, which means that critics will show up from all the magazines, newspapers and broadcast outlets to watch and review it. Once it enters that attention sphere, editors will undoubtedly start commissioning features and interviews and all that jazz. If you are working in movie publicity, it’s much, much easier if the film is being released theatrically.
And so the box office receipts can be misleading. They aren’t a linear figure heading towards a line that divides profit from loss. For cinema chains (the forgotten ugly duckling of this whole process) they are a simple equation. Sell tickets, make money; empty seats, lose money. But for studios and distributors, the question is more complex than ever. Sure, a significant part of Sinners’ financial return will be via ticket sales, but part of the initiative is to drastically increase the profile of the film ahead of its VOD and/or streaming release. And, on that front, mission accomplished.
2. Underserved demographics turn out for their movies.
Part of the complexity to this discourse is a slight sense that the conversation is being clouded, from both sides, by the fact that Sinners has a black writer/director, a predominantly black cast, and makes an unapologetic appeal to black viewers. So when people say “good, not great” about the box office return, are they unconsciously patronising the film? And, conversely, when people react strongly to interrogation of the figures, are they defensive about the show out of a protectiveness of its sense of identity?
The truth is that Sinners demonstrates that demographics that are underserved by the general fare offered at cinemas will turn out in big numbers. Coogler’s previous blockbuster, Black Panther, proved this. It is the 3rd highest-grossing Marvel movie ever (beating out Avengers: Infinity War and more than tripling the gross of this year’s Captain America: Brave New World) and the 6th highest grossing film ever in the United States. It’s not just non-white audiences that show up and buy tickets when they get a rare blockbuster that’s tailored to their community: think about the success of Barbie as a rare summer blockbuster that’s explicitly tailored to women (there are occasional ‘blockbuster’ animation projects, like Frozen or Tangled, that have young girls in mind, but vanishingly few big-budget propositions aimed at an intergenerational female audience).
This is not an infinitely repeatable proposition. Half of the reason, I suspect, for these movies doing well at the theatre is because they are a rare commodity. And if studios cynically put out half a dozen black-led blockbusters is a year, there would undoubtedly be diminishing returns. But what it does reject is the idea that the highest-grossing films need to be generic, multi-demographic mush like The Avengers. That project was clearly designed by committee so that it would have some appeal to women as well as men, some appeal to black and Asian audiences as well as white ones, some appeal to older folk as well as kids. What you end up with is a movie for teenage boys, with occasional sops to other demographics (a girlboss superhero who slays both fascist alien overlords and the jumped-up frat boys at work; a kick-ass Chinese-American intergalactic mercenary who goes for an inexplicable cut-scene in Shanghai). That pleases no-one, except teenage boys. And teenage boys are so served by the culture currently that they can’t move for more content being thrown at them. This is especially damaging for theatrical distribution, because no demographic has moved further from the cinema that white, male teenagers, who are in thrall to the short-form world of YouTube, TikTok and every other streaming platform. Sometimes it’s far better to play to a demographic that might actually be excited to buy a $20 ticket to your film.
3. Anything post-covid should be taken more seriously.
I’ve said this before, many times, but I do think it’s important that any analysis of the state of theatrical distribution makes a big allowance for the post-covid landscape. Marketing expenditure has long been a huge expense for films, but in a world where people have a) had a couple of years getting completely out of the habit of going to the pictures, and b) have more on-demand content at home than ever before, it’s naturally going to be higher. I don’t think that the marketing spend for Sinners was anything like the outlay on a film like Barbie, but both have had to pursue aggressive, international campaigns in order to get bums on seats. This has worked, for them, but raises some pretty bleak questions for the rest of the industry. How do you get people to watch your $20–50m film, if you can’t afford to spend that money again on the publicity campaign?
Ultimately, the thing I would reinforce is that it doesn’t really matter how well individual films do. We are in a cinematic landscape where some films will do really, really well, and there will be an attempt to narrativise (read: propagandise) that success as the industry bouncing back. All that really matters are the total box office weeklies, the cumulative intake across the theatrical distribution landscape (whether you’re watching Sinners or some black and white French movie about shagging your clarinet teacher). Sinners’ opening week saw $197,637,283 returns; a significant increase, year on year, from 2024, when the same week saw $101,007,766 in sales and the unloved Civil War as the top release. Two weeks before Sinners — April 4th-10th, 2025 — saw a weekly haul of $254,523,049, the highest of the year so far, on the back of The Minecraft Movie. That’s an April taking to get excited about.
And, indeed, for all my gloom about theatrical distribution, this year has started a lot more strongly than 2024. The average number of releases is down a bit, but the overall box office takings are up. This has been aided by a rare February release for Marvel in the form of Captain America: Brave New World (even if it performed very poorly by their standards) and the success of Minecraft and Sinners. The year’s second Marvel film, Thunderbolts*, seems to be performing middlingly at present. The real questions for the industry will come over the summer months, when family friendly blockbusters tend to be released and the box office figures ought to double. Then we will start to see where all this settles. But don’t be distracted by the over-performance of single titles — this is an industrial problem, and it requires a pan-industry solution.
