Bonus* Sinners Movie Review

Loren LoRosa breaks down numbers and her thoughts about the movie 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Twist. I'm a homegrow that knows a little bit about
everything and everybody, you know, if you don't lie about that, right,
all right? So I told y'all that I was going
to get into my thoughts about Sinners, the movie by
Ryan Coogler, because it is. It's insane. If you haven't
seen it, go watch it. But let's get on into it.
Sinners is a horror film starring Michael B. Jordan by

(00:23):
Ryan Cougler and Baby. I've seen the film twice so
the opening weekend placed Sinners number one in the box office.
They made forty eight million dollars domestically and sixty three
point five million dollars globally, nineteen point two million dollars
domestically just in the opening day, and that number was
actually captured before the opening day even closed. This made

(00:45):
this the second biggest opening day for an original horror
film this decade. But this also made this film the
biggest debut in post pandemic history for an original film,
and Ryan Cougler and the cast earned a rare A
Cinema score. This is the first horror film to do
this in thirty five years. Don't You don't even Gotta

(01:09):
say nothing, y'all, Like that is so fire and Sinners
needs to make two hundred to two hundred and twenty
five million dollars globally in order to break even theatrically.
So the money that was put out to push the
film to do everything that they needed to do, you know, globally,
that is that's that's the number that they need to return.
Right now, this movie has surpassed a Minecraft movie already

(01:32):
numbers wise, right, A Minecraft movie is set to make
is predicted to make seven hundred million dollars globally. A
Minecraft movie is in seventy six international markets. Centners movie
is in seventy one international markets. So I'm gonna read
a tweet from Variety. This happened early in the release

(01:53):
of the movie. Variety released this statement, I mean this
headline on X. Sinners has a mask sixty one million
dollars in its global debut. It's a great result for
an original R rated horror film. Yet the Warner Brothers
release has a ninety million dollar price tag before global
marketing expenses, so profitability remains a ways away, y'all. They

(02:17):
hadn't even closed out Sunday. They hadn't even closed out
all seventy two hours of the weekend, and these were
the headlines every time they talk about black movies in
the theaters. Instead of talking about how well they're doing,
they talk about what is not being done. Let's talk
about what's actually happening here, and if they're not gonna
do it, I will. So I saw some people upset,
and I wanted to get on here and have a
conversation about that, because what is what Centners is doing

(02:40):
outside of hitting all the marks we talked about earlier
making all of the money, making Michael be Jordan look
damn good, because baby, the muscles were muscle ling, okay,
Michael B Jordan. And I don't know if it was
like the muscles with the guns and the action and
the but Michael b Jordan was he was giving it up. Okay,
he was looking good. So there's most conversations happening, but

(03:00):
I'm gonna focused on three. So the Bible thumpers right
now are having a conversation as they always do anytime
a black horror film drops. The Black Bible Thumpers come
out and they start having a conversation about black magic
and witchcraft and vampires and you know, darkness and the
devil and all of these things. And I get it.
I was raised very traditionally in a very black traditional church.

(03:22):
Where As I was watching this, I was like, my
grandmother would be pissed at me sitting here watching this
movie right now. But I think when they start having
a conversation around black magic and a lot of that thing,
a lot of those things in the movie, you really,
honestly just begin to see our healing power, Like especially
strong Black women in faith, Like strong Black women rooted
in spirituality and faith, they always emerge as being the

(03:45):
leaders of their relationships, of their families or their communities,
and they're often overlooked. What they do is often overlooked,
is often mopped until it's like the world is exploding.
I think we saw you will see if you have
not watched it yet, and if you did watch it,
you see that story life and play out, and you
know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not going to
give it away. But it also dies into, like, you know,

(04:06):
the struggle with God that I think black people have,
especially Black people in poverty or in really hard situations,
they're always asking God why. Like there's a lot of
loss in this film, there's a lot of like we
had to fight, we had to kill, we had this,
we had to that. So God in the conversation around
that is like everybody's trying to get away from God
in this movie, and they're trying to find something, whether

(04:27):
it's money, whether it's love, whether it's wholeness, whether it's
a friend group, whatever, And it all comes back to
at the end of the day, the person who is
the main character in this film, taking us right back
to God. And I feel like that's what the vampires
kind of showed. It was like, here's these these bad
people who are doing these bad things. But because of

(04:47):
it's like a cause and effect. Because of that, people
are coming together, they're having a fight together, they're realizing
who really is there for them. They're realizing what happens
when you, you know what I mean, give your power and
your energy to the negative thoughts in the you know,
all the stuff that the devil tries to wrap you
up into, especially when you're doing well. You figured out something,
You figured out a way to make some money and maneuver.

(05:08):
I also thought that, you know, there was like such
a black versus white conversation in this movie the white
passing conversation was like one that I think a lot
of people didn't really sit with. I think a lot
of people just saw black versus white, because that is
very prevalent in the movie, especially before the time period
that the movie is during the gym Crow period, so
especially during the time period the movie is placed in

(05:30):
where the movie is placed, and that is very prevalent.
There's a lot of like leaning into Irish culture as well.
And it made me like google the Black struggle and
the Irish struggle. In this film, you really get a
sense of like, if we had all just figured it
out and work together, could it have been better? Because
at one point they were the white people, weren't weren't

(05:53):
fooling with this little set of white people, this set
of Irish people, right, and they were pushed away. They
were they were that they were able to assimulate back
into culture way differently and come up of course, you know,
and and that's a conversation for another day, but it
was there for them too. So even with you know,
certain people of certain uh you know, backgrounds, choosing to

(06:16):
be so black versus white, when in reality, there are
sectors of these cultures where it's like y'all weren't accepted either.
They wasn't fooling with y'all either, to the point where
they bring the KKK into this, and I'll just give
y'all a little spoilers, so spoiler alert. Some of the
evil people that are Irish, they even lean into the

(06:36):
fact that they had to bring in a member of
the k KKK and kind of work this person so
that they had an inside man because they wasn't fooling
with them either, nor were they fooling with us this
whole movie either. So that was it made me look
look up that and again I'm not comparing the two
because black is black, period, and you can't tell me
nothing about what we're dealing with it if you look
like a white man white men, you know what I mean, period,

(07:00):
you just can't tell me it's just not happening. And
I'm trying to figure out, like what Ryan Cookleer's point
and that was, and honestly, it made me want to
do more research. And we're reading around that and I
love films that do that, but the White Passing Conversation,
it brought that up a ton because the ability to
just kind of like move in an out of different
cultures in different sectors, different music, different energies, different you

(07:22):
know what I mean, struggles versus non struggle, and to
turn it on and turn it off. The ability to
do that it comes back to, you know, backfire in
this film really heavily, like extremely heavily. Y'all, y'all gotta
go see this movie. But I will say though, like
the way that mainstream media covered this movie, I think
it's not going to do anything but help it. I
got to move on now because it's so hard to

(07:43):
talk about the film without giving y'all the film. But
please go see Centers if you have seen it already,
drop alone to comments some of the conversations that you
picked up from the movie. There's a lot more like
I was in the movie, like writing down like a
notepad of just different things I wanted to research, and
like just just so much stuff, just soul, my stuff.