Six months after its release, the world is still obsessed with Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.
Go to a costume shop this Halloween, and you can get a Smoke/Stack costume; viral memes of the sometimes saucy dialogue still pop up in our algorithms, and it keeps getting more accolades as it heads into Oscar season.
While the love for Sinners has been pretty universal, it has also brought a particular sense of joy to Black America. It has been a balm in a year that has been shrouded in tragedy, darkness and uncertainty.
Coogler believes the parallels between the Depression-era time period in Sinners and the reality of the world we are living in now have helped strengthen the connection between the audience and the horror flick.
“I think the film is set during a time that was awful. It was 1932, an awful time to be a Black American,” Coogler said in an interview with EBONY. “But that said, through the act of these people affirming their humanity every day in the face of a society that was trying to strip them of it — the act of that, I think, spoke so much to the human condition, that this art form affected the entire world, you know, and it still continues to affect it. People today in 2025, they connect with that.”
That connection was evident at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles where hundreds of people packed in on a lawn for Cinespia’s special screening of Sinners. It was the first time in the organization’s 24-year history of showing films that they had shown a movie that premiered in the same year of its release, only adding to Sinners‘ status as an instant classic.
Many people showed up to the film in cosplay: there were Marys and Cornbread covered in blood, folks dressed like Smoke or Stack, and even a dude with a banjo who danced around during the film’s gory but memorable dance scene. And the crowd erupted in cheers as Coogler gave a surprise introduction before the film, joined by his fellow producers: wife Zinzi Coogler, and Sev Ohanian, as well as Cornbread himself, actor Omar Miller.
For Coogler, who spoke to EBONY before the screening, the response is particularly gratifying because it crystallizes the vision he had while making Sinners: an audience-packed movie theater experience on huge screens. It’s the kind of reaction he’s gotten for most of his career, with films like Black Panther and Creed, but given the unique storyline—a vampire epic set in the deep south in the Jim Crow era—Sinners was still a gamble.
“I love this film. You know, I loved it before I wrote it, before we made it. And the people that made it with us all loved it, but we didn’t know how the audiences would respond,” Coogler said. “We didn’t know if they would love it as much as we did, but we hoped they would.”
Although some in Hollywood questioned whether the movie would be profitable, given the rare deal Warner Bros. made that returns the rights to the movie to Coogler after 25 years, Sinners’ success quickly quieted all the doubters. It has now grossed nearly $280 million at the box office in the United States alone and is likely to be an Oscar nominee.
While the film has given Coogler the freedom to do nearly anything he wants in Hollywood, he is focused on something else it gave him that he sees as more crucial: Joy.
“It gave me a lot of joy to make a movie like this, to work with art so closely on something that I was directing, to work on my production company (Proximity Media) in an official capacity on what I was directing,” he said. “And I think joy is the type of freedom, you know what I’m saying? Anytime you’re really enjoying what you do, it’s fulfilling.”