Everyone in Hollywood wants to succeed. What nobody admits is that success almost always makes you a worse person.
Sure, it can fatten your bank account and help you get things made. But when people start treating you like a god, staying grounded becomes nearly impossible. Eventually, you lose touch with the things that shaped you and made you distinctive in the first place.
It takes a special person to stay immune from all that flattery, which is why, as I wandered the Warner Bros. lot with Ryan Coogler in late November, I was struck by how well his humility has held up.
“You get used to compartmentalizing,” he said.
Few directors have had a better year than this 39-year-old Oakland native, whose 2025 cemented his place in the uppermost tier of blockbuster auteurs. After proving himself an expert steward of franchise fare with “Creed” and two culture-shifting “Black Panther” movies, Coogler notched an even more significant hit this year with “Sinners,” an original crowd-pleaser he wrote about twin brothers (both played by Michael B. Jordan) who open a juke joint in a Jim Crow-era Mississippi that’s beset by vampires.
Powered by strong reviews and premium ticket pricing, “Sinners” became the highest-grossing original live-action movie in 15 years, topped only by Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” which he made in between his second and third Batman films. “Inception” helped tee up the rest of Nolan’s career, and with Coogler now similarly positioned between his second and third “Black Panther” films, a comparison feels irresistible.
But Coogler isn’t inclined to dwell on such things. As we walked past the school facade from “Abbott Elementary,” he recalled a meeting at Warner Bros. while making “Creed.” He sat at a long table packed with executives eager to impress him, Jordan and Sylvester Stallone, a producer and co-star on that “Rocky” spinoff. Coogler got through the heady meeting by relying on the mental compartmentalization that had been drilled into him as a college football player.
“I can’t engage with it as the kid whose dreams were to come to Hollywood and make movies,” he said. “I have to engage with it as a professional shepherd of the story.”
In person, Coogler is a thoughtful, deliberate speaker, with an unforced humility rarely found at this level of hit-making. He has been this way since I interviewed him for his first feature, “Fruitvale Station” (2013), even as other ascendant power players I’ve known over the years grew glib and self-satisfied. It surely helps that Coogler still lives in Oakland, surrounded by friends and family, though Jordan believes there’s more to it.
“I think success only amplifies who you are in the first place, so Ryan is going to be Ryan,” said Jordan, who has starred in all of Coogler’s films. He likened his director’s modesty to a mirror that neutralizes Hollywood artifice. “You can’t be fake,” he said. “You would feel fake for even trying it on him!”
Though Coogler isn’t in the habit of celebrating himself, a monthslong awards campaign often requires it, and pundits expect this season to shine a bright spotlight on “Sinners,” which just earned seven Golden Globe nominations. I could already sense Coogler’s raised profile as we talked on the steps of a chapel on the studio backlot: Before long, a tram drove past, and the tour guide turned to his passengers with the excitement of a man who’d just landed a big fish.
“Do you know who that was?” he asked.
IN SUCCESS, “SINNERS” may now seem like it was always a sure thing. But when Coogler first pitched the idea to the creative partners he founded Proximity Media with — his wife, Zinzi Coogler, and the producer Sev Ohanian — both were taken aback.
“I remember my initial feeling being like, man, is that a Ryan Coogler movie?” Ohanian said.
They knew Coogler’s collaborators would follow him anywhere, but because of the film’s genre elements, “we were all walking hand-in-hand a little worried,” Zinzi Coogler said.
The director himself wondered what his audience would make of this riskier, rated-R project. “I was thinking that every day, bro,” he said. But he was eager to push the audience and his own creative boundaries, stepping into more risqué territory for the first time in his career.
“We would talk about how this movie had to be the sexiest movie any of us had ever made because it was carnal,” Coogler said. He wanted “Sinners” to evoke the feeling of looking through old family photos and realizing that your relatives were once young and vibrant, too: “Like, yo, my granddad was hot — no wonder he had 10 kids!”
For Coogler, who was inspired to tell this story by a great-uncle who taught him to appreciate blues music, the characters had to feel familiar: “They were just you in a different circumstance. If you were Black, you were sharecropping, and you get a few hours of release Friday and Saturday night and Sunday morning at church. But you got the same hopes, desires, dreams, ambitions, bumping up against the realities of this place.”
The centerpiece moment in “Sinners” vividly explores that idea. As Preacher Boy (Miles Caton) sings the barnburner “I Lied to You,” time collapses and the juke joint fills with West African drummers, B-boy break dancers and one exuberant twerker. Summoned by Preacher Boy’s song, each embodies a different expression of the same ecstatic, defiant release.
Seen through that lens, Coogler’s habit of decentering himself in conversation starts to make more sense. It’s the only way he can reconcile something that seems so mind-melting: His films are rooted in his specific experience as a Black man from the Bay Area, yet they resonate with people all over the world.
“There’s got to be something deep down within us that understands,” he said. “My mission every time I pick up a camera is to know that the only reason I have this job is because we’re basically all the same in different circumstances.”
Still, with “Sinners,” Coogler had no pre-existing property to hide behind, no comic books or “Rocky” films to reference when actors asked why things were a certain way. For as collaborative as he tries to be, this time everything came directly from his own heart and mind.
“I did feel more vulnerable,” he said. “I ended up talking to actors about things you don’t normally share on other movies and getting to a place where they understand, ‘Oh, my director experienced a loss that maybe he still is not at peace with yet.’”
TWO DAYS BEFORE we spoke, Coogler made an emotional speech at the Hollywood Walk of Fame, where Chadwick Boseman was honored with a posthumous star. It was the first time Coogler had discussed his “Black Panther” actor in a public setting since Boseman’s 2020 death at 43 from colon cancer.
It took all the compartmentalization Coogler could muster to even begin the speech, but as he settled in, telling funny and humanizing stories about his star, Coogler found himself laughing. Then he held up a copper bracelet Boseman had given him when they wrapped the Marvel film.
“I looked for it frantically after he died,” Coogler said, his voice breaking. “I took him for granted. I figured he’d always be around.”
Coogler doesn’t want to take anything for granted anymore — not when too many good people are gone, and so much can change on a dime. It’s part of the reason he hoped to make “Sinners” so fast, he told me at Warner Bros.: “There was a fear of it all being taken away and not getting a chance to open up more to the audience that’s been supporting me so much.”
That’s also why he is letting himself enjoy this awards season more than he might have in the past. Whether he gets to hang out with his “Sinners” cast or reunite with old friends like the “Hamnet” director Chloé Zhao, Coogler has been hitting the circuit in a grateful mood. “Anytime I get to see my friends, I’m happy,” he said.
Still, there is nuance to all the awards hype. Though “Sinners” looks to be a major Oscar player, that voting body has never nominated Jordan for his acting or Coogler for his directing — indeed, no Black filmmaker has ever won in the latter category. Asked to join the academy in 2016, Coogler declined the invitation.
“It’s not out of animosity,” he told me, noting that he’s stretched thin with commitments to his film school and unions. “And I’m not good at judging things, bro. The act of ‘Hey, pick the best thing’ is very stressful for me, even when there’s no stakes involved.”
He is more drawn to the everyday elements of his career than to the glamorous ballrooms. “People see the tuxedo, they see the red carpet, but it’s real blue-collar folks making these movies happen,” Coogler said, adding that he truly fell in love with filmmaking once he understood that, at its core, it’s a job.
“Most days, I’m wearing coveralls and Columbia gear, trying to find solutions that aggregate up to a story,” he said. “And that enabled me not to engage with any narratives around what it is that we do.”
STILL, THOSE NARRATIVES build on their own, and the one forming around Coogler is potent. “Sinners” has affirmed his place among a handful of directors under 50 — including Greta Gerwig and Jordan Peele — who create blockbuster entertainment with a distinct point of view that can connect with millions of people.
“I think he’s starting to understand more where he’s at in the industry,” Jordan said. “It’s a weird thing, coming from where we come from and coming up the way we came up, to really take a measure of where you are with your peers.”
Maybe because of that uncertainty, Coogler has approached almost every project assuming he would never get another chance.
“I didn’t think I would last in this industry, looking at it pretty fatalistically,” he said. Even after the first “Black Panther” became a record-breaking, billion-dollar hit, he still felt unsure: “Then Chad died, so I was questioning everything.”
It wasn’t until he was done with the “Black Panther” sequel that Coogler finally allowed himself to picture a long career. “There were points in that movie where it felt unfinishable,” he said, “so when we put it out and I was happy with the film, I felt like, ‘OK, I could do this for the rest of my life.’”
So what might that future look like? I asked Coogler if he had started contemplating his career after the third “Black Panther” movie, expected to be released in 2028.
“To be honest with you, yes,” he said. “The image I get is a green meadow with Bay Area fog on it, and it’s dawn. That’s what I see after that movie, because it feels like open land, open opportunity.”
When I asked Jordan what Coogler might pursue with all the power and prestige he has accrued, the actor took a moment to think.
“I can see him wanting to chill and take a break to replenish his creative juices and go be with his kids,” Jordan said. “And then, somewhere within that, he’ll get restless.”
He imagined Coogler jotting down ideas and filling a mental whiteboard without even meaning to: “Then he’ll come back with something I couldn’t even guess right now.” When I relayed that to Coogler, he let out the heartiest laugh of our conversation.
“Mike knows me really well,” he said.
Coogler hasn’t made any firm decisions, mostly because he’s so focused on the third “Black Panther” film, which will reportedly add Denzel Washington to the cast: “I’m so fired up about that movie, bro.” He is also excited about projects he will produce with Proximity Media, including an “X-Files” revival.
But Coogler also likes not knowing what’s next. “We’ll see what comes,” he said simply.
After the meadow?
“After that meadow.”
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
The post After ‘Sinners,’ What Will Ryan Coogler Do With All That Power? appeared first on New York Times.
