‘Sinners’ Beats ‘Minecraft’ With $45.6M in Surprise Easter Weekend Victory

“Sinners,” an original, R-rated vampire thriller from director Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan, topped the box office in its opening weekend despite steep competition from “A Minecraft Movie.”

via: THR

In a surprise upset, the movie beat fellow Warners’ blockbuster A Minecraft Movie and topped the chart with an estimated $45.6 million from 3,308 theaters, including Imax screens, well ahead of an expected $40 million. Based on Friday’s gross of $19.2 million, Sinners looked to open to $40 million, but a spike in walk-up Saturday business changed the landscape.

Sinners achieved the victory after earning near-perfect reviews and stellar audience scores. Overseas, it started off with $15.4 million from select markets for a global total of $61 million.

Not that Minecraft, now in its third weekend, is any slouch as it jumped the $700 million globally. Based on early weekend grosses, it appeared the record-breaking video game adaptation would stay No. 1 with $45 million. Instead, it’s on course to take in $41.3 million from 4,032 locations in a double win for Warner’s film empire (family films are always hard to model on Easter weekend because of holiday distractions).

Overseas, Minecraft pulled in another huge $59 million for a global total of $720.8 million, including $344.6 million domestically and $376.2 million overseas.

Needless to say, Sinners boasts a strong start for an R-rated, original period genre pic.

All eyes were on how Coogler’s Sinners performed, since the $90 million movie was made entirely by Warner Bros. movie chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy from start to finish. If Sinners continues to impress, the duo can now boast two wins in a row after several high-profile misses that reportedly made Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav consider replacing the duo, even if some of those misses were inherited projects.

Sinners boasts the best Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score of Coogler’s career at 97 percent. It was also graced with an impressive A CinemaScore from audiences and perfect scores on PostTrak. The male-skewing movie is playing to an ethnically diverse audience, with Black moviegoers making up 38 percent of ticket buyers. White moviegoers made 35 percent, followed by Latinos (18 percent), Asians (5 percent) and Native American/Other (4 percent), according to PostTrak.

Set in 1932, Sinners stars Jordan in dual roles as identical twin entrepreneurs known as Smoke and Stack. Having survived the World War I trenches and Chicago gangland, the brothers return after seven years to their segregated Mississippi Delta hometown, Clarksdale. They are flush with cash and have a truckload of liquor and a plan to open a juke joint. However, they encounter unexpected horrors.

“Sinners is the gifted writer-director’s first entirely original feature, not based on real-life events or existing IP, and he packs it with enough thematic layers and genre fluidity to fuel at least three movies,” writes David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter‘s review.

Coogler burst onto the scene with the indie hit Fruitvale Station before going on to direct Creed and the Black Panther franchise (Jordan has starred in all five of Coogler’s films). Sinners cost $90 million to make before marketing, a relatively hefty price tag for a genre movie (Creed‘s budget was $50 million).

*****

I take great offense to THR for calling Sinners a surprise upset. What it implies is the old trope that black films cannot sell tickets, when over and over black led films have proven otherwise.

It also shows with the right promotion and viable names attached such as Michael B Jordan and Ryan Coogler that people trust in these two to deliver a nuanced, multilayered story and performance.

Minecraft has made over $500 million so far. Now if you want to call a film a surprise then we can enter that movie into the conversation, so they're clearly not hurting for cash.

After seeing Sinners on Friday it reminded me why I love cinema.