Ryan Coogler just realized he keeps making his characters touch the afterlife
The Sinners director revealed he only recently noticed that all of his previous films feature characters interacting with whatever comes next.
Michael B. Jordan and Letitia Wright in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Screenshot: YouTube)
It’s always interesting when a creator notices something they’ve been doing consistently, but also without knowing it. Take a recent revelation from Ryan Coogler, who’s out promoting his new historical vampire film Sinners at the moment: Stumbling onto the fact that, in each of his previous four films—Fruitvale Station, Creed, and the two Black Panthers—he depicts his characters, in his own words, “experiencing the afterlife.” (The Black Panther movies make this literal, of course, given the nature of Wakanda’s Ancestral Plain; the other films are a bit more figurative.) Coogler describes finding these moments either in post-production, or as part of his deliberate design, but not realizing until he embarked on Sinners—which carries heavy religious overtones—that it was a concept that he’d been continually circling.
