'Sinners' Drives a Stake Through the Heart of Hollywood Mediocrity
On the one hand, you have an ultra-personal multiplex event that could not and would not have been made by anyone else — a music-driven genre mash-up that reworks age-old vampire tropes into a fresh, thoughtful, and deliciously hot-blooded period saga rooted in the specifics of Black history. On the other hand, you have a nakedly anonymous attempt to salvage a franchise that produced one of the most radical legacy sequels in the history of that concept, only to spend the last eight years selling itself out to the lowest common denominator in a futile bid for forgiveness.
That enthusiasm proved contagious. You don’t need to care about the difference between 2.76:1 and 1.90:1 to feel it in your bones when the screen widens during the film’s climactic siege, and you sure as hell don’t need to care about it in order to appreciate a director making so earnest an appeal to our attention at a time when most studio movies feel like they were made with the same casual indifference that audiences have been conditioned to watch them.
While Coogler’s first original project was always going to command a certain amount of hype, the decision to lead with its importance to him galvanized people around the notion that “Sinners” was more than just another movie they could watch at home in three weeks (rave reviews from basically every critic in the country didn’t hurt either).
Last Thursday night, moviegoers across this godforsaken land rabidly made their way to the nearest multiplex — or pilgrimaged across state lines to the closest theater capable of projecting 15-Perf IMAX 70mm film — in order to see early screenings of the first original blockbuster from a gifted filmmaker whose fame has been predicated upon his ability to put a strong personal stamp on increasingly generic Hollywood franchises.
At that very same time, halfway around the world, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and chief creative officer Dave Filoni took the stage at Star Wars Celebration 2025 in Chiba, Japan to announce that the next chapter of cinema’s most iconic saga would be directed by a filmmaker whose fame has been predicated upon his ability to be friends with Ryan Reynolds.
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The movie business has always been held aloft by the tension between genuine pop artistry and mass-produced slop, two separate but hopelessly entwined ambitions that have proven even harder to balance than the Force. While both have their value, those values are in a constant state of flux, and they can only be determined with any real accuracy by measuring the difference between them.
Seldom has that difference ever seemed more dramatic than it did at the fateful moment when “Sinners” mania overlapped with the reveal of “Star Wars: Starfighter.”
On the one hand, you have an ultra-personal multiplex event that could not and would not have been made by anyone else — a music-driven genre mash-up that reworks age-old vampire tropes into a fresh, thoughtful, and deliciously hot-blooded period saga rooted in the specifics of Black history. On the other hand, you have a nakedly anonymous attempt to salvage a franchise that produced one of the most radical legacy sequels in the history of that concept, only to spend the last eight years selling itself out to the lowest common denominator in a futile bid for forgiveness.
While “Sinners” was offering one audience something they had never seen before, “Star Wars: Starfighter” was pitching a different audience a movie so generic and familiar that even its title sounds like it’s repeating itself.
Of course, “Sinners” has the advantage of being a finished product that people have seen and loved, whereas “Star Wars: Starfighter” is still just a graphic designed to rile up the fanbase and appease whatever portion of Disney shareholders have already forgotten the great “Lightyear” debacle of 2022. (Just to be clear, this isn’t Starfighter the ship. This is the origin story of the human Starfighter that the ship is based on.) And, while anything’s possible, I’m not suggesting that Coogler’s movie will ultimately outgross the first “Star Wars” feature that promises to pick up from the saga where “Episode IX” left off.
All the same, the enthusiasm gap between these two projects — the reality of one, and the promise of another — has been tellingly immense. So far as the national water cooler is concerned, “Sinners” has ousted the Chicken Jockey as the biggest film story of the year, and stoked the rare kind of excitement that leads to $8.6 million Tuesdays and people scalping IMAX tickets on eBay. It’s also cemented Coogler’s status as a brand unto himself, and proved that Warner Bros. doesn’t have to sell its soul to “A Minecraft Movie” in order to stave off financial ruin. Conversely, there may not be a single person on Earth who’s more optimistic about the future of the galaxy far, far away now that a significant portion of its fate has been entrusted to the director of “The Adam Project.”
The serendipitous timing of these announcements was a bit on the nose. You couldn’t have scripted a better way of confirming the reality that studios have been trying to prevent ever since they offered mid-budget movies as a blood sacrifice at the altar of mega-tentpole franchises: Mediocrity is losing its grip on the public imagination. (Cookie-cutter as “A Minecraft Movie” might have been in the end, I maintain that getting the “Napoleon Dynamite” guy to adapt a plotless video game about blocks was less of a slam-dunk than it seems, and the Chicken Jockey phenomenon speaks to a degree of novelty that was missing from recent short-fallers like “Captain America: Brave New World.”)
‘Free Guy’Fox/Disney
I trust that Levy is a nice guy, and I suppose it’s possible that the sheer gravity of “Star Wars” might inspire the “Free Guy” auteur to up his game (I’d entertain the argument that both “The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi” are the best movies their respective directors have ever made), but I’m not the only one who finds Disney’s lack of faith in its signature IP disturbing, and I struggle to imagine that it will work out well for them.
Levy’s hiring only seems to deepen the s
Which is to say: Films that connected with audiences because they dared to emphasize an idiosyncratic creative vision over the safety of selling people on something they’d already seen before.