Just two days after an already impressive opening weekend performance, Ryan Coogler‘s “Sinners” might already be moving the goal posts for just how high it can climb at the box office. The industry has been oddly obsessed with whether this $90 million movie will be “profitable” so early in its box office run (for… reasons), but you have to feel good about the legs this movie most certainly has.
We’re not usually one to track daily box office numbers the way our sister trade publications would, but “Sinners” on Tuesday, April 22, just its fifth day in theaters, made another $8.6 million at the domestic box office. It made $7.8 million on Monday, taking its domestic haul to $64.4 million.
Both of those early week takes are more than the film made in preview showings on Thursday ($4.7 million). When you consider too that Tuesday screenings are generally discounted at most movie theaters, that’s a lot of people who showed up.
Only “A Minecraft Movie” just a couple of weeks ago had a bigger Tuesday in all of 2025 so far, bringing in $12.7 million in a single day. “Sinners” isn’t going to do “Minecraft” numbers, but what about “Us” numbers? Jordan Peele’s “Us” is the only other original horror movie to open bigger than “Sinners” did, with $71.1 million in its opening weekend.
In its first Tuesday, it made an additional $7.9 million and legged out to $256 million worldwide. That’s in the ballpark that we estimated “Sinners” needed to reach — roughly $270 million at the box office — if it wanted to recoup its $90 million production budget, plus any additional marketing spend.
We were just doing the back-of-the-napkin math the other day, and we said if it had a 2.5X multiple, as movies like “Us” and “Nope” had, “Sinners” could climb to $120 million domestic and approach $200 million worldwide. With an extra $16 million in just two days, the multiple could wind up being more aggressive.
“A strong mid-week gross is indicative of a film that is riding high on the momentum of tremendous positive buzz and the FOMO factor that goes along with that,” Comscore Senior Analyst Paul Dergarabedian told IndieWire. “So while many put a negative spin on the opening weekend performance of ‘Sinners’ as balanced against its budget, I think those arguments can be put to bed considering how well this film is doing, and with a likely strong second weekend hold on the horizon the film is poised for long-term playability.”
We’ll see how much the film drops off come weekend two, which will say a bit more about its long-term prospects. Still, the film had an “A” CinemaScore and has a clear runway ahead for the next couple of weeks from other blockbusters and anything that would compete for IMAX screens.
Coogler was right to thank audiences when he did, writing a note to the people who helped support this very personal film. In a letter released yesterday, he wrote that “together maybe we can expand the definition of what a blockbuster is, what a horror movie is, and of what an IMAX audience looks like.”
No one thought a three-hour, talky, partially black-and-white biopic about the invention of the atomic bomb could be a blockbuster until it was. Just as many had doubts that a sharecropper era vampire movie about the birth of blues could be a blockbuster. Let’s see how that turns out.
