Hollywood Execs Fear Ryan Coogler’s Sinners Deal ‘Could End the Studio System’

The script for Sinners began circulating among studios in Hollywood in the winter of 2023 and resulted in a bidding war by January last year: a wild drama-thriller cum survival-horror flick set in Jim Crow–era Mississippi featuring blues-music set pieces, steamy sex scenes, Deep South occultism and dozens of Riverdancing vampires. More central to the project’s commercial potential, it had been written, and would be directed, by Ryan Coogler — the creative force behind Marvel’s $1.4 billion–grossing Black Panther — and star his frequent filmic muse Michael B. Jordan in a dual role as identical-twin gangsters turned juke-joint-owner brothers named Smoke and Stack. As one studio after another began clamoring to pay Sinners’s $90 million-ish asking price, the director’s agents at WME notified them of a few strings attached. Coogler would retain final cut (a creative dispensation reserved for the industry’s crème de la crème), command first-dollar gross (that is, a percentage of box-office revenue beginning from the movie’s theatrical opening rather than waiting for the studio to turn a profit), and, most contentiously, 25 years after its release, ownership of Sinners would revert to the director.

That last part was a dealbreaker for most studios — Quentin Tarantino is the most recent on a very short list of auteurs to demand such an exceedingly rare rights-reversion agreement. In 2017, the multiple-Oscar winner negotiated a complex pact with Sony under which copyright-control rights to his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood would revert from the studio to Tarantino 30 years after its theatrical release. And while Sony and Universal had been in hot pursuit of Sinners, Warner Bros. co-chairmen/CEOs Pam Abdy and Michael DeLuca were the only back-lot chieftains willing to acquiesce to Coogler’s unusual terms.

Directors owning their own movies is the opposite of business as usual — and to studios, cause for freaking out. According to senior executives at rival studios, the Sinners deal sets a “very dangerous” precedent. “It could be the end of the studio system,” says one exec.

Specifically, they say Coogler’s agreement is already recalibrating filmmakers’ expectations surrounding copyright ownership and distribution entitlements, restructuring a time-honored industry power balance and effectively imperiling the cinematic back catalogue: the core asset behind all movie-studio valuation. “Studios exist for one simple reason: to build a library,” this executive continues. “The lifetime, long-term value of our film properties is what makes a studio a studio. It’s why David Ellison wants to buy Paramount. It’s how MGM sold for $8 billion. Things like licensing and windowing these films throw off hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars a year globally. So the whole idea of building up your library — and you lose it in 25 years? Wait a second, you just gave up all your revenue down the line.”

Another executive at a different studio future-trips the consequences of Coogler’s deal in terms of making already fraught talent relationships even more difficult: by giving A-list directors unrealistic expectations. “If we, as a studio, give that to [Coogler], when somebody else we really want to be in business says, ‘Hey, I want this deal too’ — and you say, ‘No, I only gave it to him’ — how can we expect them to work with us?” he says. “It’s bad for the business. It’s bad for filmmaking relationships.”

In a recent interview, Coogler — whose short but impactful film résumé includes the Sundance breakout biopic Fruitvale Station, Black Panther (nominated for a 2019 Best Picture Oscar), the Rocky franchise spinoff Creed, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever — described the symbolic importance of himself as a Black director owning a film about Black ownership. “That was the only motivation,” he said of pursuing the rights-reversion deal. (A publicist for Coogler declined to make him available for an interview with Vulture.)

By several insider accounts, Warner Bros. approached the deal calculus from a defensive crouch. In 2020, during the depths of the pandemic, the Burbank-based studio shocked and infuriated its top-tier stable of filmmakers by announcing it would release its entire 2021 slate of theatrical films on its streaming service (then known as HBO Max) at the same time as in theaters. In response, the acclaimed director of Warner’s $165 million sci-fi epic Dune, Denis Villeneuve, wrote that “Warner Bros. might have just killed the Dune franchise” in an op-ed essay for Variety. The studio’s longtime box-office rainmaker Christopher Nolan, meanwhile, decamped to Universal to make his next billion-dollar movie, Oppenheimer. (Warner Bros. declined to comment for this story.)

Hollywood veterans as both producers and former co-chiefs of the film division at MGM, DeLuca and Abdy are renowned for their deep relationships with visionary moviemakers and long connection to prestige moviedom. Hired by Warner Bros. Discovery’s movie-killing, “not artist friendly but artist aware and adjacent” CEO, David Zaslav, to revitalize Warner Bros. in 2022, the duo’s mandate included remedying the studio’s ugly reputation around town for sacrificing talent to the bottom line. Abdy and DeLuca quickly made their mark green-lighting big-budget projects for a stable of esteemed, if not consistently bankable, auteurs: $130 million for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (a crime thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio), $80 million for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! (reportedly a punk-rock art-house revision of The Bride of Frankenstein), $80 million for Saltburn writer-director Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and, of course, Coogler’s Sinners.

“Warners is outpaying everyone for everything,” says our first executive. “The Wuthering Heights thing is a disaster; that’s crazy paying that for those rights! The attitude at Warners is ‘Our studio is in trouble. We’ve got to get it going. Do whatever.’ But whoever is running the studio in 25 years is not going to be Zaslav or Pam and Mike. So [the Sinners deal] is a short-term decision to help the financial quarter out, to help the year out, to help them relaunch. It’s just that these short-term decisions have long-term effects. They don’t think, Well if you do this, the studio system is going to be gone. Not thinking of the ramifications.”

To be sure, there are other members of the so-called Copyright Club, including Mel Gibson (who retained ownership rights to The Passion of the Christ by self-financing its production budget when no one else would touch the project), Richard Linklater (who negotiated partial copyright ownership for his coming-of-age drama Boyhood, which was shot in fits and starts over 11 years), and Peter Jackson (who, as a producer, came to own the underlying rights to District 9 by bankrolling the sci-fi thriller from first-time feature director Neil Blomkamp). Two insiders with knowledge of Tarantino’s rights-reversion deal point out that it wasn’t new or unique to Sony but in effect a holdover from an agreement at his previous moviemaking home Miramax (then headed by disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein), where the director had limited license terms on all his movies, such as Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. “That was grandfathered in,” says a third source familiar with the copyright deal on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. “Because the Weinstein business was made by Tarantino, they gave him whatever he wanted. And when Tarantino started to do stuff elsewhere, [Sony] was like, ‘Well, he had it. So if we want to be in business with him, we got to keep it going.’”

In the view of a high-level talent agent with a privileged understanding of negotiations surrounding Coogler’s deal, studio-executive fears that directors around Hollywood will start demanding copyright ownership en masse are overblown. “It’s not every director that can ask for this — it’s only the top, AAA-level directors who control a piece of IP,” this agent points out. “They go out with it, and everybody wants it.”

“Look, here’s the problem in Hollywood, okay?” he continues. “There’s no rationale or logic behind absolutely anything. So anytime there is a filmmaker who has a lot of heat and — I hate to say this — but when you have a diverse or a female filmmaker who has a lot of heat off a movie, then it’s all about, What can I get? Hollywood will pay for what they have to pay for. If you control it, and you have a lot of bidders, you can make a different kind of market.” (Coogler has characterized the deal as a one-off and says he won’t seek to own future movies.)

Currently sitting at 99 percent “fresh” on the Tomatometer, Sinners will have its work cut out at the box office. Until Black Panther’s record breaking $235 million opening, conventional industry wisdom held that films with predominantly Black casts typically underperform financially overseas. A recent report in the industry newsletter Puck posits that the vampire thriller will have to gross in the neighborhood of $300 million before turning a profit — an especially daunting prospect for an R-rated, non-IP original film with disparate genre elements. For Abdy and DeLuca, the stakes seem even higher: On the heels of expensive flops made and released on their watch including Alto Knights, Mickey 17, Joker: Folie à Deux and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, reports have swirled that the pair’s days in the Warners C-suite are numbered unless they can start delivering hits. (The massive blockbusterdom of A Minecraft Movie earlier this month was a step in the right direction.)

But one could fairly argue that disruptions from the unusual largesse shown Coogler by the studio are already being felt across the movie ecosystem. Even if not directly inspired by the Warner Bros. copyright-reversion pact, a spate of new deals and recent negotiations represent a sudden tilt in the Hollywood power balance. In January, Netflix announced a highly unusual distribution scheme for Greta Gerwig’s Chronicles of Narnia adaptation which will be released in 1,000 theaters in 90 countries as well as in IMAX for a period of several weeks ahead of its streaming rollout — the largest-ever theatrical push for the platform and a move understood within the industry as Netflix giving special concessions to a billion-dollar filmmaker. As well, according to our first studio executive, who is currently attempting to set up a project with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, the actor-producers have been pushing for a copyright-ownership arrangement through their production company, Artists Equity. “They’re making the deal almost impossible,” this person says. “They really are. Because they’re like, ‘We’ve got to own a piece of it. We’ve got to be partners with you guys. Sorry.’ They’re passing on stuff that will make money because they want to control it.”

Arriving in the aftermath of a cascading series of industry calamities — the pandemic, strikes, layoffs, a plummeting box office, fires — the Coogler deal has come to be regarded as Hollywood’s latest (if not nearly greatest) extinction-level threat. “I’m not rooting against Mike and Pam; they are filmmaker-friendly, they’ve taken some big swings and had enormous misses,” one of the rival studio executives tells me. “But this deal they’ve done has made the playing field so fucked, all out of desperation. Having the copyright revert? It’s so dangerous.”