Sinners is without question the best movie of the year so far, and one of the best theatrical experiences I’ve had in a long, long time. It is everything you could ask for: an original, bold, thematically rich blockbuster full of vampires and big ideas. It’s not only an overwhelming critical success with unprecedented word-of-mouth hype, its also crushing it at the box office. For those of us who bought stock in Ryan Coogler early (Creed is the best Rocky movie, fight me), times are good.

You would think all this winning would be cause for celebration in Hollywood.

You’d be wrong.

According to senior executives at rival studios, the Sinners deal sets a “very dangerous” precedent. “It could be the end of the studio system,” says one exec.

Ooh, scary. That quote is from this article in Vulture. But what is so apocalyptic about Coogler’s deal, you might ask?

From an article in the New York Times with the headline “‘Sinners’ Is a Box Office Success (With a Big Asterisk)”:

…the film — directed, written and produced by Ryan Coogler — was expensive, analysts noted, costing Warner Bros. at least $150 million to make and market worldwide. The studio also agreed to demands by Mr. Coogler’s representatives for unusually generous compensation (emphasis mine).

To seal the deal with Mr. Coogler — other studios were also bidding on the project — Warner Bros. agreed to give him a cut of gross ticket sales (before the studio deducts costs)… (they) also agreed to relinquish its ownership of the film after 25 years. Mr. Coogler will then own it, despite not paying for it (emphasis mine again).

It’s not hard to read between the lines and figure out what the “big asterisk” really is (spoiler: it’s racism). Since when is inking a deal with a director responsible for ~$2.5 billion dollars of value worldwide considered an act of altruistic charity? How unusually generous! I’m surprised they didn’t chide Coogler for not thanking Warner Bros. hard enough for the opportunity to gross them another $200 million dollars.

Have you noticed that when the Russo brothers light $275 million dollars on fire and upload the results onto Netflix, no one bats an eye?

This how the Times reported on Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav’s pay increase in 2023, btw:

Interesting. Seems “unusually generous” to me.

But, sadly, when it comes to a young Black filmmaker with a proven track record, who puts every penny on screen (or, in this case, every wooden nickel), suddenly it’s heralding the end times for an entire industry. Funny how that works out.

Coogler’s “sin” is that he had the audacity to ask to be paid what he’s worth.

To the “Mr. Coogler will then own it (in 25 years), despite not paying for it” of it all: I understand that Ryan Coogler needs $90 million dollars, or else there is no movie. IMAX cameras ain’t cheap. But there is also no movie if Ryan Coogler doesn’t write a screenplay entitled Sinners, if he doesn’t use his singular talents to summon a scary and sexy something out of nothing. “But Christopher Nolan didn’t ask to own Inception,” is an argument I have heard in rebuttal to this deal. Why didn’t he though? He should have! It was his fucking idea.

They say art needs commerce just as much as commerce needs art. But why, in that 50/50 proposition, does one side always end up owning the final product? Feels rather unbalanced to me.

Everywhere we look in American society, artists are being devalued. Why pay a human being to express a part of their soul when we can illegally siphon the entirety of (Western) human creative expression off the internet and use ChatGPT to churn out ersatz “art” (someone should make a movie about this, maybe using vampires as the central metaphor!) But I have bad news for the real-life vampires salivating at the prospect of being able to type a prompt into a computer and generate a movie without having to deal with us pesky “creatives”: people will never, ever, ever, ever, ever watch AI slop movies, watch AI slop TV, or listen to AI slop music. It will never happen. Not at a mass enough scale, anyway. You are stuck with us.

SPECTRUM #5 came out this week! This is our punk rock issue. But don’t worry… there’s also UFOs, French poetry, and mid-century psychoanalysis. This is the penultimate issue: issue #6 comes out next month, May 21st. Watch the trailer below, then go buy a copy!