The time it takes to produce a feature film can span studio heads, a pivot to streaming and a merger or two.
As original movies take longer and longer to work their way through the studio machinery, the pace of change at studios, from strategies and shifting priorities, has sped up. Even the most veteran filmmakers have been entrapped in that antagonistic push and pull.
Sinners, the latest from filmmaker Ryan Coogler, landed at Warner Bros. at the top of 2024. A year and some change later, is hitting theaters this weekend. As for how Coogler ended up anomalously pushing his movie through a post-pandemic, post-strikes entertainment industry in what amounts to land speed record timing, that’s a longer story.
Coogler’s path from Sundance Film Festival wunderkind to seasoned blockbuster filmmaker is well known. In a sentence: The indie debut Fruitvale Station led to a shot as resuscitating a dormant franchise (2015’s Creed) that then begat his own $2 billion-grossing Marvel Studios franchise (Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever). Lesser known is his work as a producer under his Proximity Media banner, which he founded with Sev Ohanian and Zinzi Coogler.
“We met when we were 13 or 14. When you are in a relationship with someone for that long, you pull each other into each other’s lives,” Zinzi recently told The Hollywood Reporter. Zinzi worked as an ASL interpreter at a deaf advocacy non-profit in the Cooglers’ native Bay Area, while helping whenever she could on student films and, eventually, Fruitvale. (A well-worn anecdote is that Zinzi was the one who first bought Coogler the screenwriting software Final Draft to help him pursue his filmmaking career.)
While continuing to work as an interpreter on film sets like A Wrinkle in Time, Zinzi observed and advised Coogler, whom she married in 2016, on his projects as the sound stages and budgets got progressively bigger. Zinzi says with a laugh, “He would…
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