When Worlds Collide

Just days apart, filmmaker Ryan Coogler and Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos make public statements that reveal the stakes in Hollywood's increasingly uncivil civil war.

Generally speaking, April isn’t a big movie month. Oscar winners from February/March are still playing out while publicity is ramping up for May’s Cannes Film Festival and whatever tentpole will launch the Summer movie season on Memorial Day weekend. April is a breather month. That said, there are a few noteworthy exceptions since 2000: the last two Avengers movies, Infinity War (2018) and Endgame (2019) as well as four Fast & Furious movies, Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) and the current A Minecraft Movie. Not since 2002, however, has an original film cracked the top ten April openers. That film, the only indie on the all-time April openers list and one of the only two independent films on the inflation-adjusted list of the 200 most successful films of all time, is My Big Fat Greek Wedding (The Passion of the Christ, from 2004 is the other). Incredibly, more than two decades later, it’s about to have some company. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a rare auteur-driven mid-level studio release based on an original script not authored by Quentin Tarantino or Christopher Nolan, should go into this next weekend with roughly $195 million in domestic gross, leaving it just $15 million shy of passing 2011’s Fast Five to move into the top ten all-time April openers. Expect that milestone to be reached sometime between Friday night and Saturday afternoon.

Make no mistake, Sinners is a noteworthy and significant success. Conventional Hollywood wisdom says it should not exist. It features a majority Black cast. It’s a horror film. It’s a period film. It’s rated R. If you’re a studio executive looking for a reason to not green light a movie — any one of those will do. Taken all together? Kiss of death. Conventional Hollywood wisdom would have sent this project to pasture without even reading the logline. But Coogler is also not a conventional filmmaker. His Warner Bros. deal for the film, which has been both widely reported and misreported, is something of a milestone insofar as the rights revert to him at some stage around 2050 when he will still be a youthful 63. At the same time, Warner Bros. is leaving nothing to chance in its present release, scheduling the film for digital and VOD on May 20, which is also certain to undermine its box office run. That is unless Warner Bros. come to their senses and do what Universal failed to do with Wicked — and leave the movie in theaters until audiences have had their fill.

This all comes a time when studios continue to retreat from theatrical release motion pictures while peddling the idea that original films, mid-level films, auteur-driven films and films featuring ethnic minorities all need to go to streaming because nobody wants to see them in theaters. Coogler, for his part, is a true believer in the power of the cinema. Shot in 70mm IMAX, Sinners joins Oppenheimer and The Brutalist in the new movement to resurrect widescreen formats which have remained largely dormant for the better part of the past 50 years. Like Christopher Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino and Sean Baker, the Oscar-winning writer/director of Anora, Coogler is going to the mat to preserve the movie theater experience concurrent with a new push to expand release windows — and audiences have rewarded him. To thank them, as he did with Black Panther in 2018, Coogler released a public letter of gratitude — and it’s a beautiful thing. He writes:

I believe in cinema. I believe in the theatrical experience. I believe it is a necessary pillar of society. It’s why me and so many of my colleagues have dedicated our lives to the craft. We don’t get to do what we do if you don’t show up.

Coogler released the letter to social media on April 22, the Tuesday following the film’s landmark opening weekend. Incredibly, two days later, apparently paying zero attention to what had just transpired in the culture, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos showed up at the Time100 Summit in New York, sat down with Time magazine editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs, and proceeded to bury his foot in his mouth. In stark contrast to Coogler’s effusive exhibition of grace and humility, Sarandos waxed nauseatingly arrogant:

“Folks grew up thinking, ‘I want to make movies on a gigantic screen and have strangers watch them [and to have them] play in the theater for two months and people cry and sold-out shows … It’s an outdated concept.”

Calling the communal experience “an outmoded idea,” Sarandos further attempted to justify his reasoning by saying that “If you’re fortunate to live enough in Manhattan, and you can walk to a multiplex and see a movie, that’s fantastic. Most of the country cannot.”

As it happens, most of the country also can’t walk to a restaurant. Or a concert venue. Or a live sporting event. Or a museum. Just about every work of art in all the world’s museums can be seen online in far better detail than would be possible in casual museum viewing — yet the world’s top 100 museums host nearly 200 million visitors each year, many if not most of whom spend thousands of dollars in travel and lodging expenses to do so. We also cook at home, listen to music at home and watch sports and concerts on television — while simultaneously spending millions of hours and billions of dollars keeping the hospitality, live concert and professional sports industries afloat. Clearly, the convenience of the couch is insufficient to stem the human need to embrace the “outmoded idea” of the communal experience. By Sarandos’ logic, Taylor Swift’s concert tour should have been a bust and gone straight to streaming. Instead, the 149-show tour became the most successful in history, drawing more than 10 million fans and raking in over $2 billion in ticket sales (not including merchandise). The subsequent self-distributed theatrical concert film added another $261 million — roughly $20+ million tickets — before landing on Disney+ where a comparably modest 4.6 million “views” in its first three days instantly elevated it to one of the most successful ever concert films on streaming.