Ryan Googler’s highly anticipated new movie Sinners, starring Michael B. Jordan, is finding redemption at the Easter weekend box office. Ditto for Warner Bros.
The critical — and audience darling — topped Friday’s chart with $19.2 million from 3,308 theaters, including Imax screens. That put the supernatural period vampire pic ahead of fellow Warner’ release A Minecraft Movie, although the latter is expected to pull ahead of Sinners sometime on Saturday.
Based on Friday numbers, Minecraft is expected to stay atop the chart for its third consecutive weekend with $45 million from 4,032 locations as it nears the $350 million mark domestically and approaches $700 million globally.
Sinners is pacing to earn $40 million to $42 million, a strong start for an R-rated, original genre pic. Including early overseas grosses, its global total through Friday was north $26 million.
All eyes are on how Coogler’s Sinners performs, 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 unhappy, 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 nearly half of all ticket buyers so far. White moviegoers made up 27 percent, followed by Latinos (14 percent), Asians (6 percent) and Native American/Other (4 percent), according to PostTrak.
A period pic, the 1932-set 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 (the latter two both starred Jordan). Sinners cost $90 million to make before marketing, a relatively hefty price tag for a genre movie (Creed‘s budget was $50 million).
Elsewhere, Angel Studios‘ Easter-themed The King of Kings is perched in third place. The animated pic about the life of Jesus is expected to earn $17 million to $18 million in its second weekend for a narrow drop of 12 percen or so after adding 335 theaters to its count. The film, now playing in a total of 3,535 theaters, boasts a coveted A+ CinemaScore and is playing best in middle America and the south.
Disney and 20th Century’s Rami Malek spy drama The Amateur is holding in fourth place with an expected second-weekend gross of $7 million to $8 million from 3,400 theaters.
A24’s gritty U.S. Navy Seal drama Warfare will round out the top five with an estimated $4.8 million to $5 million from 2,670 sites (in honor of Easter weekend, A24 is discounting ticket prices for military members.) The Iraqi war pic was co-directed by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza, a former SEAL.
