We can’t imagine it takes much to make a movie studio executive nervous these days. The box office is still sluggish in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdowns; not even superhero movies can act as guaranteed slam dunks; and you know that smug bastard Seth Rogen is out there somewhere, just waiting to turn your latest public fiasco into a TV show. No wonder the Hollywood elite are so skittish that something as interesting as Ryan Coogler’s recent deal for his Southern vampires movie Sinners has some of them screaming “Hollywood apocalypse!”
It’s like this: Coogler, who was fresh off a very serious run of hits—including Creed and two Black Panthers—when he was shopping the Michael B. Jordan project around, had a number of requirements when he looked to hammer out a deal for Sinners with studios. Some of these were big asks, but not outside the realm of possibility for a guy currently riding a series of major box office wins: Final cut of the movie, and first-dollar gross. (That is, Coogler starts getting a portion of the film’s profits from the moment it opens in theaters, rather than having to wait for the studio to make back its money.) The really biggie, though, was one that more than one studio reportedly balked at: Coogler wanted ownership of the film to revert to him after 25 years.
This is unorthodox, to say the least; Hollywood studios derive a ton of their value from the vast libraries of films they own, so losing even one—and all its attendant potentials for licensing, sequels, redistribution, etc.—is usually pretty unthinkable. (It usually only happens when a director takes huge risks like self-financing a movie: Mel Gibson owns The Passion Of The Christ, for instance, while Richard Linklater has partial ownership of Boyhood. Quentin Tarantino, meanwhile, will get ownership of Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood back in a couple of decades, essentially as a continuation of old deals he used to have with Miramax from the days when the whole studio was basically resting on his back.) Coogler scoring a rights reversion on what’s only his fifth movie is an outlier—one that’s as much a reflection of how much Warner Bros. Pictures has been floundering in recent years as Coogler’s own rising star status.
Excepting a current Minecraft-shaped life raft—which has at least a chance, in its third week, of eclipsing Sinners when it premieres at the box office this weekend—the studio has been taking it in the teeth ever since at least the start of COVID. No studio weathered that storm in perfect condition, but WB wound up blowing up not just its finances but its reputation, alienating creators with its decision to put movies on VOD and streaming alongside their theatrical releases. The studio is still smarting from losing Christopher Nolan over this, so studio heads Pam Abdy and Michael de Luca were apparently willing to go to pretty extreme lengths to make Coogler happy on Sinners.
Coogler has said that he considers the ownership deal a one-off, rooted at least in part in Sinners‘ focus on themes of Black artists’ ownership of their own culture. Most of the hysteria surrounding it is, essentially, hand-wringing about what comes next: What happens if some other up-and-comer asks for “the Ryan Coogler deal”? (Seems like you could just say, “Sure, show us the Ryan Coogler money,” but we are not extremely skittish Hollywood execs.) For now, it’s mostly a look into the mindset of the Hollywood animal, where any film exists, not so much for its own sake, but for how it can be milked in perpetuity. Meanwhile, we get some absolutely killer quotes out of the anxiety, including one unnamed studio type saying “Look, here’s the problem in Hollywood, OK? There’s no rationale or logic behind absolutely anything.” We’d always wondered!
