The Truth About Sinners: Variety’s Review Missed the Bigger Picture

Why the Sinners Horror Film Is More Than Just Scary

The Sinners horror film didn’t quietly show up in theaters. It arrived with purpose. A Black filmmaker chose to tell a horror story rooted in truth, pain, and historical reality. This film doesn’t rely on sanitized scares or recycled tropes. It stares directly into the legacy of racial violence and refuses to look away.

This isn’t just “Black horror” in the marketable sense that studios love to co-opt. It is a story grounded in the terror of the Jim Crow South, in state sanctioned brutality, and in generational trauma that continues to echo. That’s the top that matters, especially to us here at Hollywoodland News. In a genre that still centers white protagonists, suburban dread, and safe endings, Sinners offers something much harder to digest. It is bold, uncomfortable, and absolutely necessary.

Instead of treating it as a landmark or a creative risk worth taking, early media coverage immediately reduced it to a question of profit. Variety’s piece led with budget talk. The headline focused on financial speculation, not on the cultural weight or creative vision behind the film.

That shift in framing is not just disappointing. It is part of a larger industry pattern. When Black-led films take up space, especially ones that speak truthfully about America’s past, they are often stripped of their substance and measured only by their marketability. The question becomes whether the creators can “pull it off,” not whether the story deserved to be told in the first place.

The real fear here isn’t the horror on screen. It’s who was allowed to make it, and what they chose to say.

The Parallels Between Sinners and Get Out

The skepticism surrounding the Sinners horror film mirrors the initial reception of Jordan Peele’s Get Out. When Peele, primarily known for comedy, shifted into horror with a film about systemic racism, the industry didn’t quite know what to do with it. Despite Get Out’s critical acclaim and box office success, it was still miscategorized. The Golden Globes submitted it in the “Best Comedy or Musical” category, which sparked immediate backlash.

Jordan Peele emphasized the film’s serious themes in a March 2017 NPR interview, saying, “It comes from this fact that in order to deal with my own fears, I wanted to be able to sort of master them. It’s really just what I want to be doing.” That same philosophy could be said of Sinners, which also takes on fear, not just for entertainment but as a tool for survival and truth telling.

Even Lil Rel, who played one of the film’s most comedic roles, took to Twitter and said, “… if I can be honest this is weird to me… Their [sic] is nothing funny about racism… Was it that unrealistic lol.” His reaction made it clear that Black audiences weren’t laughing. They were seeing themselves reflected in a way that felt raw and unfiltered.

Peele also told The Guardian in 2017, “We are now living in a system where racism is involved with policy. We’ve left the era where people were trying to pretend that race doesn’t exist.” That quote may be nearly a decade old, but it hits just as hard today especially when you watch how Sinners is being treated.

Like Get Out, Sinners uses horror to confront historical trauma. But once again, the film is being framed more by its budget than by its message. Instead of focusing on the creative vision or cultural weight, the conversation has been dominated by whether it was a financial “risk.” This isn’t just a misstep. It’s a pattern.

The parallels between Sinners and Get Out expose a persistent industry bias. Black filmmakers continue to have their work scrutinized for profitability long before it’s given credit for its artistry or impact. These films are powerful because they make people uncomfortable. And that’s exactly why they matter.

How Variety’s Framing Set the Wrong Tone
& Why the Sinners Horror Film Deserves Better

Variety’s review and box office report called Sinners a “lavishly serious popcorn movie” and framed it as both ambitious and overloaded. But the framing didn’t stop there. In their write-up about the film’s opening weekend, they wrote:

“It’s a great result for an original, R-rated horror film that takes place in the 1930s, yet the Warner Bros. release has an eye-popping $90 million price tag before global marketing expenses, so profitability remains a ways away.”

That sentence says everything. Even after reporting a $63.5 million global debut, the takeaway is not about what the film achieved—it is about what it supposedly failed to deliver.

Instead, this film is framed through doubt and through through risk. Through a lens that fixates on cost and cautiously underlines every bit of praise with a financial warning.

This isn’t unique to Sinners. It’s part of a pattern. When Black filmmakers helm big-budget films that center Black history or Black characters, the language shifts. Praise is paired with skepticism. Success is undercut with asterisks. The art is framed as too specific, too serious, too niche.

But there is nothing niche about racism. There is nothing niche about generational trauma. There is nothing niche about the way Sinners reclaims horror to tell a story most mainstream studios would never greenlight without a name like Coogler attached.

This film deserved better than “eye-popping price tag” coverage. It deserved better than profitability panic in the opening paragraph. That kind of framing tells the audience not to get too invested. It sets the tone that this is a film to be watched with caution, not celebrated with intention.

What Horror Really Needs Right Now

Horror has always been a mirror. The best horror stories don’t just scare us. They reveal something uncomfortable or something buried, and I’m not just talking about buried in someone’s backyard. Because of that’s true, this mirror has reflected only one kind of fear. That is ultimately the fear of the suburban white protagonist. The genre has been crowded with haunted houses, possessed children and masked men chasing blond women through quiet neighborhoods. What it has lacked is what Sinners offers and that’s not just buried in the backyard but buried as a nation and as a people.

Sinners is not interested in imaginary threats. Its horror is grounded in historical fact. It draws from Jim Crow violence, from the legacy of white terror and from the generational weight that never really left. The vampires aren’t scary because they’re supernatural. They’re scary because they are familiar and represent what has always been there. If horror movies like Scream were groundbreaking because they made fun of the genre, Sinners is groundbreaking because it holds the genre accountable.

This is what horror should be doing right now. We don’t need to recycle the age old tropes in 2025 or cutting away when the truth gets too raw. Horror needs to return to what made it powerful in the first place. It needs to speak to fear that isn’t just cinematic. It needs to tell the stories that white Hollywood ignored or distorted for decades.

Horror has always been political. That is not new. What is new is who is finally being allowed to say something through the genre. When Black directors, Indigenous directors, and other historically erased storytellers step into horror, they are not breaking the rules. They are honoring them.

What horror needs right now is honesty. Urgency. And the kind of creative freedom that Sinners was bold enough to use. The discomfort this film causes is not a flaw. It is the entire point. If the genre is going to grow, it has to grow out of its narrow definitions. And that growth will not come from another haunted mirror. It will come from stories like this one.

Why This Film Deserves Better Coverage

Sinners is not just another horror release dropped into a crowded schedule. It is a major studio film with a Black director, a Black lead, a historically grounded narrative and a creative vision that refuses to be small. That alone should have made it a headline but instead of treating it like a landmark, most early coverage treated it like a gamble.

Variety called it a “lavishly serious popcorn movie” and described it as “overloaded.” The review walked a fine line between admiration and apology. It praised the world building and performances but kept returning to the idea that the film might be too much and I mean that by saying they thought the film was too ambitious or too deep or too layered, as if those are weaknesses.

This is not how we talk about films made by white directors with big budgets and complicated narratives. When Scorsese makes a three-hour movie full of symbolism, it’s treated like cinema. When Christopher Nolan turns timelines into puzzles, critics call it genius. But when a Black filmmaker draws from real history and packs a story with meaning, the framing shifts. It becomes about restraint and about whether the audience can handle it.

We should be asking why that double standard still exists.

It is not enough to say a film is “interesting” or “difficult” and leave it at that. Sinners is not difficult. It is deliberate. It is layered by design. It is bold on purpose. And it deserves to be covered by people who understand what it is doing and why it matters. I know that generally not a lot of people read Hollywoodland News but this is why we exist, to tell those stories and give an accurate framing of the picture.

This is a film that tells the truth in a genre built on metaphor. That is not overload. That is vision. And if the industry cannot recognize that, it is not the film that needs to change. It is the lens through which it is being viewed.

Support the Stories That Shift Culture

We don’t need to wait for permission to value a film like Sinners. We don’t need a fresh round of think pieces or a second wave of critics to tell us what this film is worth. We already know. We feel it in the weight of its story, in the risks it takes, in the space it opens up for future storytellers who have something to say and the craft to say it.

What we can do now is talk about this film the way it deserves to be talked about and not as a surprise, not as a risk and not as a misstep. This is more of a statement, as a shift and part of a growing movement of horror that reflects real history, real pain and real power. That is why we can name the bias when we see it. We can push back when coverage downplays cultural work by calling it too ambitious or too expensive or too niche. We can amplify the voices behind these stories instead of waiting for the industry to catch up.

Most of all, we can show up. We should be showing up in the theaters and we should be showing up in the conversations. Let’s show up and support creators who are telling stories that challenge, inspire and disrupt.

This isn’t just about Sinners. It’s about what kind of art we say we want and what we actually fight for when it shows up.