Ryan Coogler explains why he chose to make Sinners before Black Panther 3

Ryan Coogler chose to make the vampire movie Sinners before getting to work on Black Panther 3 – and now, he explains why

Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever director Ryan Coogler is expected to make Black Panther 3 at some point – in fact, there has already been a lot of talk about Denzel Washington joining the cast of that movie. But before he returns to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Coogler has decided to make Sinners, a genre picture and a period piece he worked on with frequent collaborator Michael B. Jordan. Coogler and Jordan previously teamed up for Fruitvale Station, Creed, Black Panther, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever as director and cast member, and have other collaborations that Coogler didn’t direct. The film is set up at Warner Bros., has a budget of around $90 million, and is scheduled for a theatrical release on April 18, 2025 (having moved back from a previously announced March release date). During an interview with Deadline, Coogler explained why he decided to make Sinners before Black Panther 3.

Directed by Coogler with Jordan playing dual roles, Sinners has the following official synopsis: Trying to leave their troubled lives behind, twin brothers (Jordan) return to their hometown to start again, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back. “You keep dancing with the devil, one day he’s gonna follow you home.” 

This project is being kept so tightly under wraps that when it was looking for a studio to call home, “executives and buyers were forced to make the pilgrimage to the Beverly Hills offices of WME, the agency that represents Coogler and Jordan, in order to take a gander on the script and get details.”

Coogler (who is also developing a reboot of the TV series The X-Files) is producing the film with Proximity Media partners Zinzi Coogler and Sev Ohanian. Rebecca Cho serves as executive producer alongside Will Greenfield and two-time Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Goransson (who won his first Oscar for his work on Coogler’s Black Panther and his second for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer). The Motion Picture Association ratings board gave the film an R rating for strong bloody violence, sexual content and language.

Jordan is joined in the cast by Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit), Wunmi Mosaku (Loki), singer Miles Caton, Delroy Lindo (Get Shorty), Jack O’Connell (Unbroken), Omar Benson Miller (CSI: Miami), Li Jun Li (The Exorcist TV series), Yao (The Last Bout), Jayme Lawson (The Batman), Lola Kirke (Mozart in the Jungle), and musician / cinematographer Peter Dreimanis.

Coogler told Deadline that he chose to make Sinners before Black Panther 3 because he realized “I had been on this path of what I could make and what I wanted to make. And realizing they had all been in the service of stories that were outside of myself. … I found a way into all of them, but Fruitvale Station was a real story that happened. Creed, that I was making for my dad, that was my way in, but that was Sly Stallone’s, and Irwin Winkler and Bob Chartoff, their thing. I reframed it and made it personal, but that was still their thing. Black Panther, that was an open directing assignment, a job I was hired for. Thankfully the studio was interested in my perspective, in my reframing, and it was four years into that fabric, bro, because of the tragedy we all endured. But I looked up, and I got two kids now, one was born in Georgia while I was there making a movie. And I said, bro, I’m almost 40. I got this company that can make things. I’ve engaged with audiences all over the planet, man. Who can say, at my age, that they’ve had four movies released theatrically? And yet I still haven’t really opened myself up to the audience.” The filmmaker acknowledged that there have been “pieces of him” in his work, but “I still haven’t brought something that was just me. And how funny is it that when I say, ‘Hey, I’m making a horror movie,’ and people are surprised. But if you know me, I love those movies. If I had to reckon with the fact that the audience doesn’t truly know me. And I got scared that I would look up and be 50 and would still be in that situation. And by then, I might not have anything to say. So the movie was made because I had to make it right now. And with the people that I wanted to make it with, it had to happen now. Or if not, it wouldn’t. I feared that. And that was why now.“

When asked what his go-to horror movies are, Coogler replied, “I consider Spielberg’s work in the horror space to be a bit of a North Star. And it is complicated with him, right, because he hasn’t out and out made a horror movie before. But I would classify Jaws as a creature feature horror film, and Jurassic Park as well. Jurassic Park is a stealth horror movie. The whole thing of, what if dinosaur were real? But when you talk about those T-Rex scenes, the Velociraptor intro, the ‘raptors in the Kitchen, that is out and out horror cinema. And it is popular. It is visceral. It gets the audience feeling like they’re on a damn roller coaster ride. Then there’s this movie that came out in 2015 called Green Room. It’s fantastic. And it is basically like the house of horrors movie played for real over 24 hours. This semi-pro punk band gets stuck in a venue in rural Oregon that’s owned by neo-Nazis that are led by Patrick Stewart. And it is brilliant, bro. And the makeup effects are so stark that I hired the guy that did them, for Sinners. A guy named Mike Fontaine, who’s exceptional, a savant. He’s the guy who put the penguin prosthetics on Colin Farrell for that show. Taking it back, I love John Carpenter. My dad’s favorite movie as you know is Rocky II. We never talked about what his second favorite movie is, though, and that’s Halloween. So if I watched Rocky II five times, I watched Halloween three times. One of my mom’s favorite Carpenter films is The Thing. They love Carpenter, but different films and the only film they ever agree on to watch is The Fugitive. Otherwise, he’s watching Steven Seagal films and she’s watching Martin Scorsese films. My dad, every time he’s taking Halloween and maybe Assault on Precinct 13. For mom, it was The Thing. I love it, the isolation, the practical effects, the cosmic horror of it, and the threat, the idea of, ‘Hey, you got to stop this thing, or it’s going to wreck the planet.’ All of a sudden, a rag tag group of guys that can’t figure out how to do a blood test, now have to save the planet. There’s Robert Rodriguez and From Dusk Till Dawn… Even more than From Dusk Till Dawn, I love The Faculty from Rodriguez. I love how he mashed up Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing, but set it in a 1990s high school. I love the confusing mishmash of movie and setting. And then a big one for me that I heard about and finally got to see, was Don’t Look Now. A fu*king masterpiece, bro. And it has the best intimacy scene I’ve ever seen in a movie. And how you got to see these characters experience pleasure and it buttressed how dark the movie actually is, in a way that informs relationships and informs the world. But that movie just took my breath away. Also love Rosemary’s Baby and The Silence of the Lambs.“

Now that Ryan Coogler has taken the opportunity to make a horror movie, will you be watching it? Let us know if you’ll be checking out Sinners by leaving a comment below.