Once or twice per decade, a film arrives that refuses to choose between art and commerce. Sinners is 2025's version of that miracle: 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, $369 million worldwide on a $90 million budget (310% ROI), 16 Oscar nominations, and the BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay. Ryan Coogler did not just make a great film. He wrote a structurally perfect screenplay.
We ran Coogler's structural profile against our 20-feature correlation engine. The results are remarkable.
Feature-by-Feature Breakdown
Sentiment Arc Slope: The Master Pattern. Sinners begins in warmth โ the twin brothers Stack and Smoke returning to Mississippi, the joy of community, the promise of the juke joint. Then Coogler drops the floor out. Vampires descend. Friends die. The sentiment arc plunges. But the climax โ Sammie's musical awakening, the community's defiance โ pulls it back up. This is the exact "controlled descent followed by sharp recovery" pattern we see in S-Tier screenplays. Our data shows sentiment arc slope correlates positively with IMDb rating (r = 0.044) and audience score (r = 0.047). Coogler nails it.
Unique Character Count: The Ensemble Advantage. With dual roles for Michael B. Jordan, plus distinct supporting characters (Sammie, Mary, Remmick, the various juke joint patrons), Sinners has an elevated unique character count. Our data shows this feature correlates positively with audience score (r = 0.062) โ the strongest audience-side character metric we track. More characters means more perspectives, more conflict, more for audiences to latch onto.
Sentiment Variance: Emotional Range. This is where Sinners truly separates itself. The script oscillates between ecstatic musical sequences, tender love scenes, visceral horror, and solemn historical reflection. That emotional range โ the variance in sentiment across the script โ positively correlates with box office (r = 0.052). Audiences pay money for emotional roller coasters. Coogler built the best one of the year.
Vocabulary Richness: Deliberate Restraint. Despite dealing with complex themes โ race, history, supernatural evil, the Great Migration, blues music as spiritual weapon โ Coogler's dialogue is grounded in vernacular. The brothers speak in 1930s Delta dialect. The vocabulary richness is controlled, not inflated. Our data shows vocabulary richness correlates negatively with every critical metric (r = โ0.134 with RT, r = โ0.116 with audience score). Coogler keeps it real, and the numbers reward him.
The Horror-Drama Hybrid Secret
What makes Sinners structurally unique is its genre-blending. Pure horror scripts tend to have high action ratio (chases, attacks) and low dialogue ratio. Pure dramas flip those ratios. Sinners splits the difference:
- Dialogue ratio: Elevated (long community scenes, brother-to-brother conversations)
- Action ratio: Moderate (contained to specific vampire sequences)
- CAPS density: Above average (horror demands emphasis: "THE DOOR SLAMS. BLOOD.")
This hybrid profile captures the best of both worlds โ the critical metrics that reward dialogue and the commercial metrics that reward intensity. It is the structural equivalent of having your cake and eating it.
The Original IP Premium
Sinners is an original screenplay โ not a sequel, not an adaptation, not a remake. Among our 20,000-film dataset, original scripts that break $300M worldwide are exceptionally rare. The fact that Sinners did it while earning a 97% RT score suggests something our data has long hinted at: when an original script hits the right structural features, the ceiling is higher than any franchise entry.
Predicted tier: S-Tier. Actual performance: S-Tier across every metric. Coogler wrote the algorithm.