Sinners was, in many of the ways that matter, the movie of 2025. Not necessarily the best movie—though you’ll find plenty happy to make that case, now that list-making season is upon us—and not quite the year’s biggest hit either. Rather, Ryan Coogler’s supersized supernatural blockbuster fused critical and commercial enthusiasm into a kind of mass obsessive fervor. It became, for a few weeks, the film everyone was talking (and raving) about, which doesn’t happen too often in the era of infinite content overload.

That’s not all that Sinners fused. The marketing campaign promised a stylish throwback creature feature from the writer-director of Creed and Black Panther. But Coogler had more on his mind than cheap thrills. This wasn’t just his flavorfully claustrophobic monster movie, but also his Prohibition-days crime picaresque, his action-packed Western, his Southern Gothic soap opera, his ensemble portrait of a Delta town under the shadow of the KKK, and even his own bluesy riff on an MGM toe-tapper, complete with numbers that span a century of Black musical expression, like the cinematic equivalent of OutKast’s “B.O.B.” Forget “best.” Sinners may well be the most movie of 2025.

Such a watercooler triumph is a boon for the industry at large; at a time when theatrical attendance still hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic numbers, anything driving people back to the movies has to be considered a greater good. Yet the industry response to Sinners, at least as reflected in the initial coverage of its returns, told a different story. One of the towering successes of 2025 was met with a curious skepticism from the bean counters and analysts—a rush to qualify and undercut the good news that bordered on hostility. The Monday-morning quarterbacking, which clashed hard with the glowing reviews in some of the same publications, unusually framed Coogler’s victory: Somehow, he made the giant hit that Hollywood didn’t want.