Ryan Googler’s critically acclaimed Sinners starring Michael B. Jordan bit off an impressive $4.7 million in Thursday previews as Easter weekend gets underway at the box office, where the period vampire pic will battle with A Minecraft Movie for top spoils. Speaking of the latter, Minecraft jumped the $300 million mark on Thursday domestically.
All eyes on are how Coogler’s Sinners performs, since the bold original pic was made entirely by Warner Bros. movie chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy from start to finish.
Sinners has plenty of advantages as it arrives on the big screen. Reuniting Coogler with his go-to leading man Jordan, the R-rated movie boasts the best Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score of Coogler’s career with 97 percent.
Warners, trying to manage expectations, is targeting an opening in the $35 million to $40 million range for Sinners. There’s reason to be circumspect, considering the film is an R-rated, period supernatural vampire pic. Tracking services are more bullish in suggesting $40 million to $45 million, while rival studios think Sinner‘s launch could end up north of $50 million.
Produced and co-financed by Legendary alongside Vertigo, Minecraft should easily earn $40 million to $45 million in its third outing as it jumps the $600 million mark globally, including $300 million domestically. The film is on its way to becoming one of the top video game adaptations of all time, and is already the top-grossing pic of 2025 in a feather-in-the-cap for De Luca and Abdy.
Sinners is a defining moment for the executive duo and their commitment to working with high-profile auteurs, and giving filmmakers a relatively wide berth in terms of budget. Sinners cost $90 million to make before marketing, a relatively hefty price tag for a genre movie (that’s ahead of the $50 budget for Coogler and Jordan’s Creed).
Coogler burst onto the scene with the indie hit Fruitvale Station before going on to direct Creed and the Black Panther franchise.
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.
