Last Thursday night, moviegoers across this godforsaken land rabidly made their way to the nearest multiplex — or pilgrimaging 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.
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.”)
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 sense that Jon Favreau’s forthcoming “The Mandalorian and Grogu” — possibly the worst movie title I’ve heard since “Star Wars: Starfighter,” in addition to being an outgrowth of a TV show that lost most of its luster two seasons ago — isn’t just a stop-gap to buy the franchise some time, but also a reflection of the studio’s apprehensiveness to make any decisions it can’t take back.
But, as I recently wrote about in the context of Disney’s “Thunderbolts*” trailer and what it means for the MCU to restyle itself in the vein of A24, “the future belongs to movies that people actively want to see,” and the decision to go with someone as flavorless as Levy reeks of the “let’s coast off a love of the brand and not offend anyone” approach that simply doesn’t work anymore.
I know that Irvin Kershner and Richard Marquand weren’t exactly the most idiosyncratic directors of their day either, but the second and third “Star Wars” movies didn’t have to justify their own existences in the same way that “Starfighter” will; they didn’t come out at a time when people could watch a variety of aggressively mid “Star Wars” TV shows from the comfort of their homes.
And, not for nothing, but even the relative passivity of television isn’t safe from the numbing glut of streaming content. Case in point: The buzz around “Starfighter” was immediately eclipsed by the electric reaction to the new season of “Andor,” which just so happens to be the only “Star Wars” project since “The Last Jedi” that defies expectations as to what its franchise can be and do.
“Sinners” isn’t based on pre-existing IP, but its success depended upon a brand of a different kind. Not only is the film about pop art’s power to preserve cultural memory as part of an intergenerational song of pain, hope, and the pursuit of freedom, it was sold on the strength of Ryan Coogler’s self-evident passion for telling this particular story (a story whose origins trace back to his late uncle James, who once seeded the young filmmaker’s imagination with vivid details about growing up in the Delta).
Warner Bros. didn’t hide the fact that audiences would get two Michael B. Jordans for the price of one, or that both of them would square off in a blues-soaked battle royale against a horde of white blood-suckers at the height of the Jim Crow South, but it’s no accident that the most effective piece of marketing — by far — was a 10-minute Kodak video in which Coogler talked people through his new movie’s various screening formats.
Today’s audiences have grown somewhat accustomed to the concept of shifting aspect ratios and the benefits of large-format theaters (every new Christopher Nolan film comes with its own infographic explaining the difference between IMAX, lieMAX, and the sub-human poverty of a standard DCP), but it something very different to see a cool young filmmaker so enthusiastically nerd out about the perforations on the side of an Ultra Panavision frame. Cutting between exclusive “Sinners” footage and film school-worthy clips of Coogler standing in front of the diagrams he’d drawn on a white board, the video went viral because it clearly illustrated how much this shit means to him, and how much attention he and his team paid to making the experience special for moviegoers.
As the director said in a recent interview: “I want people walking out of the theater and thinking, ‘Man, I had a full meal. They really care about the medium.’ Everybody on the project knew that this was going to theaters. They all care about seeing movies on the big screen and what it feels like when you see a good one.”
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).
It lay the groundwork for the film to feel like an event, it teed the film up to deliver on that promise, and it set the stage for audiences — especially Black audiences, who continue to be starved for mega-budget studio movies that provocatively engage with race as something more than a temporary branding initiative — to unpack the layers of its meaning on social media with a much greater degree of thought and wonder than the likes of “Snow White” or “The Amateur” managed to inspire.
It’s good that “Sinners” is great, but I tend to suspect that even a somewhat less successful version of the same film would have triggered a broadly similar response, which is to say that “Sinners” is sparking so much real excitement because it palpably came from such a real place.
While it’s not a coincidence that “Nope” was the last completely original movie to hit at this level (another self-aware spectacle that interrogated the blind spots of Black representation on screen, and will be dominating best of the decade lists in a few years’ time), the fervor around “Sinners” also puts it in a category that Jordan Peele’s creature feature shares with “Oppenheimer,” “Avatar,” and “Nosferatu.”
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. Hollywood is soiling itself at the thought of a director (eventually) owning the rights to his work? Hollywood should be kissing Ryan Coogler’s feet for creating a film that already feels like it belongs to him.
