BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 11: Ryan Coogler (C) and cast and crew of “Sinners” accept the Cinematic and Box Office Achievement award onstage during the 83rd Annual Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton on January 11, 2026 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/CBS via Getty Images)
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Writer-director Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster vampire movie Sinners is winning acclaim and awards season recognition for many reasons, including a spiritually impactful dance scene in the film before all hell breaks loose.
Set in the 1932, Sinners stars Michael B. Jordan as twin brothers Smoke and Stack, who after serving in World War I, return to the hometown in the Jim Crow South in the Mississippi Delta to start their lives anew by opening a juke joint. When dusk hits, however, Smoke and Stack discover that the town is infested with vampires — adding an unforeseen level of death and destruction to an already evil surrounding filled with systemic racism and generational trauma.
Sinners is imbued with blues music throughout, and in one particular scene, Coogler creates an astonishing dance sequence as the music created by as preacher’s son, Sammie (Miles Caton), summons the spirits of ancestors from the past and descendants from future generations to accompany their family members of the present.
During a conversation with the host of the Good Hang with Amy Poehler podcast that was released on Tuesday, Poehler asked Coogler how scene materialized in the script.
“I outlined the script before the final draft and writing it, and I didn’t really have that surreal element to it,” Coogler told Poehler. “It was just going to be, ‘Preacher boy sings and people like it’ — that’s what it said in the outline.”
When it came to writing the script, however, Coogler said he felt a “strange” feeling come over him.
“I felt strange because I had fallen in love with all of these characters. I didn’t want them to die. I realized that in this movie if you get bit in the neck, you check out,” Coogler told Poehler. “I felt bad, and I realized that this scene was the midpoint and it dawned on me that these people — not the people in the script but the real people they are based on; these Black folks in the 1930s who were of age to be in this juke joint — they were living in Clarksdale during Jim Crow [and] they all were sharecroppers because there was nothing else that society allowed them to be. Their grandparents were enslaved. Their children and their children’s children would still be sharecroppers.”
However, Coogler added, the sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South invented an “impactful American contribution to global popular culture” with the blues music they created and listened to “because they wanted to feel alive for a few hours and wanted to feel alive for a few hours on Friday and Saturday night.”
“I think that they had no idea that the music they were listening to would change the world,” Coogler explained to Poehler. “So, I thought about that [and wondered], ‘I’m going to kill them with vampires? I’ve got to have something else in the movie that is some type of victory moment.’ That is where the idea of depicting how powerful and transcendent Sammie’s voice is to call a vampire, [that] maybe it could call these people’s ancestors and descendants, too.”
‘Sinners’ Has Become An Awards Season Juggernaut
Sinners was first released in theaters in April 2024 and was instantly deemed by the entertainment media an awards season contender.
Less than eight months later, Sinners was named one of the top 10 films of 2025 by the American Film Institute and the National Board of Review and received Best Picture nominations from several organizations as the Golden Globes and Critics’ Choice Awards. At the Golden Globes ceremony, Sinners was honored for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement and Best Original Score, while the CCAs awarded Coogler with the Best Original Screenplay trophy.
More recently, Sinners earned nominations for Best Picture nominations from the Producers Guild and the NAACP Image Awards. On top of that, Coogler has also been nominated for Best Director by the Directors Guild of America, and its stars, Michael B. Jordan and Miles Caton earned Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor nominations from SAG-AFTRA’s Actor Awards.
Given the film’s awards season momentum, Sinners is poised for Oscar glory with nominations for Best Picture, Best Directing and Best Original Screenplay for Coogler, and Best Actor for Jordan, among nods in a bevy of other categories.
During the Sinners’ blockbuster theatrical run, the film grossed nearly $280 million in domestic ticket sales and $88.2 million internationally for a worldwide box office tally of $368.2 million.
For viewers who didn’t catch the film in theaters or want to see it again, Sinners is streaming on HBO Max and video on demand.
