Sinners is excellent. The movie is quintessentially black, quintessentially Southern, and unbelievably fresh in its take on vampires and vampirism. It is as Black Southern as butter pecan ice cream and the crawdads I fished from a creek as a child.
Depression-era Mississippi is depicted with the layers that black films seldom get depicted. There are depictions of sharecropping, Louisianan hoodoo, white passing, family secrets, single-room church houses, and the blending of closed spiritual practices and Christianity that has been present in Black culture for centuries. It’s the sort of care and attention to blackness that I’ve come to expect from the film’s director Ryan Coogler.
Ryan Coogler defies the rules of black success
Coogler is having a generational run. His first film, 2013’s Fruitvale Station made 17 million on a budget of 900K (about 23.3 million and 1.2 million, respectively, as adjusted for 2025 inflation rates). His second film was Creed in 2015, which earned 173 million from a budget of 35 million (233.4 million and 47.2 million, respectively) and spurred 2 sequels and a video game adaptation. This third movie was 2018’s Black Panther, which was a global social phenomenon, earning 1.35 billion dollars (today, that would be about 1.71 billion) at the box office. The 2022 sequel, which was done after the sudden and tragic death of Chadwick Bozeman, made 850 million off of a budget of 200 million (in 2025, that would be 929 million and 219 million, respectively).
Coogler owes his success to the way he depicts the humanity of Black people. He didn’t start by writing white stories or white protagonists to get permission to make black films. He made black films, and through word of mouth and sheer talent, he became successful.
However, his success breaks a fundamental rule of being Black and successful, no matter the field: Black success without white intervention is not allowed.
Other examples of this are Shedeur Sanders, son of Hall-of-Famer football player Deion Sanders, being picked in the NFL Draft’s fifth round instead of the first, as a way to humble him and shame him for having his black father coach him, and author Percival Everett‘s Pulitzer win for his book James, which reimagines the Huckleberry Finn story from the perspective of the slave, Jim, which was downplayed by coverage that focused on the fact that it wasn’t in one of the judges top three picks for the fiction category.
The myth of meritocracy
Now, back to Sinners. The mainstream press’s coverage of the movie has implied as much, from Entertainment Weekly writing that Thunderbolts* “rained on Sinners parade” to The New York Times stating that the movie would still struggle to break even, despite it being on track to make 300 million dollars on a 90 dollar budget.
This obsession with numbers and profitability is typical in movies, which also makes it a good motte to run into. Yes, motte. Bigotry is known to use a rhetorical trick called the motte-and-bailey fallacy to maintain itself.
For those who don’t know (and weren’t subjected to philosophy courses in undergrad), the motte-and-bailey fallacy is a form of argument where the arguer conflates two positions that share similarities: one modest and easy to defend (the motte) and one much more controversial and harder to defend (the bailey). In the case of Sinners, and its media coverage, the easier position to defend is that “original movies have a harder time breaking even at the box office,” and the harder to defend position is that “this black film by a black director shouldn’t be making this much money.”
That’s the rub. Whether consciously or subconsciously, white reviews and writers are stating their discomfort with black succes—and as it becomes more and more common. As meritocracy becomes more of a reality instead of a myth, black creators’ success will be bumping up against white discomfort.
Time will only tell if that means rolling back opportunities for black creators or finally letting us sit at the table.
In the meantime, I’m gonna go watch Sinners again.
