I'm Leslie Morris, and this is Cannonball.

This week we're talking about Ryan Coogler's sinners.

Last week on the show, we were talking about the New York Times poll of the 100 greatest movies of the 21st century.

And toward the end, I got a little indignant about the idea that a lot of the films on

that list, fun, smart movies based on an original script,

they just wouldn't get made now.

They'd be considered too risky.

And we can see that aversion to risk

in the industry's response to one of the few risky movies

that did get made by Hollywood this year,

Ryan Coogler's Sinners.

When it came out in the spring,

it was sold to everybody as a vampire movie with twin Michael B. Jordan's sign us up.

But then, we actually got to the theater and discovered that this was a movie with a lot of ideas about American race and history and music.

The two MBJs open a juke joint in Jim Crow era

Mississippi and the music there is so good that a tree of a white vampires show up at this

club to bite some black necks. So the vampires are vampires, yes, but they're also a metaphor.

Sinners is the year's most popular movie that's not a sequel, not a prequel, not a reboot.

And it should be a message that we want more of this, more wild and crazy, more risk.

But the movie's success seemed to stun Hollywood and the people who cover it as though

they forgot that Coogler was the same filmmaker who also made two Black Panthers in

the first creed.

...