Over its opening weekend in theaters, Ryan Coogler’s sexy, Mississippi-in-the-‘30s-set vampire-musical survival-thriller Sinners received the dual sainthood of an A Cinemascore — the highest audience-approval rating for an original, R-rated horror movie ever — and stronger-than-expected box-office returns. Surpassing pre-release “tracking” estimates by taking in $48 million domestically (over-shooting industry expectations by $8 million), Sinners triumphed over the Easter corridor’s presumed victor, the video-game adaptation juggernaut A Minecraft Movie, and squeaked past Jordan Peele’s Nope ($44.3 million in 2022) as the best opening for a non-IP film in the post-Covid era.
But reaction to that upset victory — a $61 million global haul — has been somewhat muted around Hollywood by the question now hanging over Sinners: is the rollicking genre opus going to make or lose money for its distributor Warner Bros.? Depending on which industry trade report you believe, the movie’s profitability either “remains a long way off” or “remains a question mark.” At issue: on the heels of a studio bidding war for the property last year, Warner Bros. granted writer-director Coogler an unusually large budget — $90 million — for an R-rated, genre-agnostic, non-franchise film. Moreover, WB acquiesced to exceedingly rare terms that rival studio executives fear “could end the Hollywood studio system”: 25 years after Sinners’ release, ownership rights to Sinners revert to Coogler. And according to a report in the industry newsletter Puck, the movie will have to do around $300 million worldwide before turning a profit.
But as Sinners’ weekend box-office tallies began to trickle in around 11:00 pm Saturday night, top executives at Warner Bros. were doing veritable backflips of joy. According to a source close to the production who declined to be identified because the person was not authorized to publicly speak on the matter, the movie’s break-even point is much lower than what has been reported. According to this insider, Sinners will only need to earn $170 million globally to recoup its upfront costs (including around $75 million to $80 million for prints and advertising) when other downstream revenues including PVOD, SVOD and the network broadcast window are factored in.
While that box-office haul seems like an achievable outcome, even in an attenuated moviegoing environment (in which domestic ticket sales are showing some signs of improvement year over year but are still down 17 percent than the average of the last three pre-pandemic years), Sinners’ success may ultimately be defined by more than the bottom line. Arriving on the heels of two recent Warner Bros. underperformers — the dismal Alto Knights and Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 — the movie’s stronger-than-expected returns may be a turning point for the studio ahead of surer financial bets this summer including DC chief James Gunn’s Superman reboot (July 11) and the Brad Pitt racecar movie F1 (June 27). More intangibly, Sinners locks down Coogler’s long term commitment to Warner Bros. as a generational talent: his radically rich deal viewed inside the Burbank backlot C-suite as a “strategic gesture” to position the writer-director as a “Chris Nolan replacement.”
