Monday, October 13, 2025

Box Office, Reviews, And Relevancy – How Will Warner Bros. Handle Pushing “Sinners” And “One Battle After Another” For The Oscars?

When “Sinners” was the biggest presumed Oscar contender to screen before the fall festivals, it was fairly easy to guess it would have a harder time once more actual frontrunners showed up. Still, between so many pundits practically engraving Oscars already for “One Battle After Another” and now heavily focusing on the likes of “Marty Supreme” and “Hamnet” while they’re at it, the degree to which they have started to dismiss, if not totally brush aside, “Sinners” is very concerning, if not something worse.

It was one thing to predict “Sinners” wouldn’t be a top Best Picture favorite anymore once more of the field had screened. However, it is quite another to not only outright discount “Sinners” as a potential Best Picture winner now, but to start dropping it from the top three or five at the rate things are going. And while this kind of story has played out many times recently, in many different contexts, this abandonment of “Sinners” as a viable winner or frontrunner is shaping up as something else altogether.

The first trend this is following is that of many an early-season blockbuster, especially one from Warner Bros. With “Barbie” in 2023 and “Dune: Part Two” in 2024, Warner Bros. made them mega-hits and supposedly top-tier Oscar contenders before the fall, only to see them both drop as Best Picture win contenders and top-five films before the season ended. Presumably, their money and below-the-line wins should have been enough reward for them, especially as the likes of “Oppenheimer” and “Anora” stormed past them and everyone else in those seasons.

Now the narrative will be that “Sinners” should settle for the same thing, especially since, unlike “Barbie” and “Dune: Part Two,” it can still win significant awards like Best Original Screenplay, the inaugural Best Casting Oscar, and several techs. Nonetheless, the more pundits keep dropping “Sinners” down while uplifting other contenders at its expense, the more it might lose frontrunner status in those categories too. This kind of downfall ultimately prevented “Barbie” from winning Best Adapted Screenplay, kept Greta Gerwig from a nomination in Best Director, and doomed “Dune: Part Two” to another Best Director snub for Denis Villeneuve and several fewer nominations than the original “Dune.”

This is an oft-told story not just for early-season blockbusters, but perhaps blockbusters in general. That might not seem so distasteful with “Sinners” if it weren’t for another trend that is dangerously on track to follow: the fading of African-American-led/made contenders.

Two such examples happened just last year: “Sing Sing” was the early frontrunner for Best Picture before the fall, and “Nickel Boys” was among the most acclaimed movies of the fall and the entire year. But because everyone stopped raving or talking about “Sing Sing” the longer the season went on, and because “Nickel Boys” couldn’t catch on with voters like it did with critics, these two Black-led and -made films went from early-season frontrunners to ending on the bubble. In fact, “Sing Sing” missed Best Picture entirely because of it, and “Nickel Boys” only barely got in, missing everything else except Best Adapted Screenplay.

At this time last year, “Sing Sing” was seemingly a mortal lock for at least two acting nominations, a frontrunner in Screenplay, and a surefire leader for Best Ensemble, and then none of that happened. Now, twelve months later, “Sinners” is already looking less like a lock for even one acting nomination, is looking more fragile for SAG and other Ensemble prizes, has Ryan Coogler knocked back down to the Best Director bubble, and may or may not wind up holding on in Best Original Screenplay.

It would be one thing if it at least stayed a top-three contender all season and salvaged a Screenplay win like “Get Out” did in 2017, yet that came a year after “Moonlight’s” shocking Best Picture win, when the tide was starting to turn from the “Oscars So White” years. In more recent times, African-American-made and -centered movies have not had such luck at the Oscars, from the collapse of “Sing Sing” and “Nickel Boys” to international and hyperkinetic indie films reaping greater benefits from an expanded Oscar voting pool.

In this framing, “Sinners” going from Best Picture favorite to middle-of-the-pack nominee or worse is extra concerning. It is particularly worrying for a film that had the box office advantages “Sing Sing” and “Nickel Boys” didn’t, yet now struggles to stay on the radar with newer frontrunners, even this early in the game. And quite frankly, considering direct comparisons with what is now taking up everyone’s attention and being crowned instead, the real hypocrisy might only just have started to play out.

Sinners” is directly suffering because another Warner Bros. film, “One Battle After Another,” not only has the studio’s full attention but that of the entire Oscar punditry and fandom. What’s more, “One Battle After Another” has also been heralded as the big-budget, blockbuster-level movie with the most cutting social commentary of the moment, all of which “Sinners” had dibs on not long ago. But as soon as one compares how “One Battle After Another” does it to how “Sinners” did it, the case for the former looks far wobblier, and it raises many more troubling questions about why it is being elevated as our future winner anyway, and by whom.

Sinners” is created from and primarily for an African-American perspective, using the vampire genre as broader commentary on Black artistry and music, white exploitation of it, and cultural theft in general. It is produced by someone deeply immersed in all these subjects and more. In contrast, while “One Battle After Another” centers on political revolutionaries that include several Black or biracial women, they are ultimately supporting or only borderline lead characters to Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn’s main figures, handled by a writer-director in Paul Thomas Anderson who has never really written about Black women or revolutionaries before, and whose inexperience shows in some very glaring ways.

For all the hype about “One Battle After Another’s” political relevance, its supposed revolutionary messages and heroines like Teyana Taylor’s Perifida, Regina Hall’s Deandra, and Chase Infiniti’s Willa, there are stretches where it threatens to feel merely like a white guy’s cosplay version of revolution and of certain types of Black women. The authenticity that is never in doubt with something like “Sinners” and a writer-director like Coogler is harder to grasp with “One Battle After Another” and someone like Anderson, at least without further viewings and mulling it all over a bit more. However, giving Anderson the benefit of the doubt is easier for some than it might be for others.

Sinners” doesn’t have a friendly white face at the center like DiCaprio or any all-white face to make things easier for white audiences and voters. “One Battle After Another” may ultimately position Willa as its real hero, but achieving this often makes handling other minority characters and their screen time a more challenging issue beforehand. And arguably, it is less politically revolutionary than the hype suggests, considering the failures of its most radical characters and movements, while “Sinners” mowing down the KKK at the end probably qualifies as a radical statement by the grim standards of 2025.

Despite “One Battle After Another” being hailed as a trenchant commentary on white supremacy and its current power, “Sinners” probably has it beat on that mark as well, and in a less comforting way to certain viewers and voters. While “One Battle After Another” is chock-full of evil white people serving a cruel system, its representatives, like Steve Lockjaw and the cultish Christmas Adventurers Club, are often more ridiculous than threatening. “Sinners” features a main white nemesis with a somewhat comical veneer, the bloodsucking Remmick. Yet the white supremacy he represents is more insidious, less over the top, and harder to distance from than the likes of Lockjaw’s, that of an Irish immigrant offering “salvation” to his future victims but really dooming them to assimilation, exploitation, and monoculture in return, much like white land grabbers and profiteers did to him, the Irish, and many more groups before and after them.

There’s no DiCaprio-esque white good guy to make “Sinners‘” commentary go down easier, as the most sympathetic white-passing character is part-Black herself. Even with the real larger enemies in the Klan getting gunned down afterward, “Sinners” ends up more bittersweet and less sentimental than “One Battle After Another” turns out to be, as its characters are still doomed from the start, not just because of the vampires, and endure it all for just a few hours of true freedom when all is said and done. Compared to that, “One Battle After Another’s” satire, framing, and messaging are more comforting to its target audience than anything else, as its most radical warriors are borderline fetishized and ultimately ineffective in the big picture, its greatest enemies and their system are more mockable than frightening, and it throws more bones to reassure white and international audiences, whether consciously or not, than “Sinners” ever bothers to.

At the moment, “One Battle After Another” doesn’t have to face such scrutiny compared to “Sinners,” in part because it isn’t seen as its top competition anymore. If its biggest challenger turns out to be a more traditional, tear-jerking film like “Hamnet,” a more stylized film like “Marty Supreme,” or another blockbuster like “Wicked: For Good,” then there are fewer landmines for it to deal with. Only in a direct “One Battle After Another” vs “Sinners” showdown does it get trickier to argue for the former, yet for one reason or another, the race is being pivoted away from such a battle.

Beyond all that, “One Battle After Another” is also far less of a hit than “Sinners,” as much as box office issues annoy many by now. Yet it is inevitable that “One Battle After Another” will lose money. If not as much as first feared, it will not be the kind of box office phenomenon “Sinners” was, nor will it defy early low projections like “Sinners” did. But while “Sinners” was disregarded and dismissed by certain trades, reporters, and pundits even after it started making money, absolutely none of that side-eyed coverage was given to “One Battle After Another” while it lost money and barely exceeded initial projections.

Now, in a way, that same thing stands to happen again in awards season, as “One Battle After Another” is forcibly locked into no. 1 at the Oscars, regardless of it losing money, while “Sinners” falls more and more on pundits’ charts, regardless of all its money and raves. Between all this and other direct comparisons with “Sinners” that don’t flatter “One Battle After Another” as much, the rise of the latter at the growing expense of the former in certain circles, now and perhaps in the future, seems more troubling in a wider context.

If “Sinners” isn’t championed and fought for to the same extent it was earlier in the season, while everyone else focuses on coronating “One Battle After Another,” positioning the likes of “Hamnet” as its new biggest threat instead, and being distracted by flashier and newer challengers like “Marty Supreme” and newer blockbusters like “Wicked: For Good” and “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” it could go from frontrunner to middle of the pack to lower tier in an even bigger hurry. While it would just be dismissed as another “Barbie” or “Dune: Part Two,” it would easily go beyond that in a larger context, and a larger one than when “Sing Sing,” “Nickel Boys,” and other smaller minority-led films went from frontrunners to afterthoughts by Oscar night or nomination morning.

The common phrase is that Black success only comes by working “twice as hard for half as much.” “Sinners” has already worked twice as hard for twice as much financial and critical success as anyone predicted, but at the pace things are going, it will only be for half as much reward at the Oscars, while something beats it with half as much financial success and focus on minority characters and certain larger issues, but with twice as much championing by more comforted and accepting voters anyway.

That may not be the defining narrative on Oscar night if “One Battle After Another” sweeps and if “Sinners” is largely forgotten or reduced to consolation prizes. But years down the line, it might look more regrettable and damning, if not to a “Driving Miss Daisy” over “Do The Right Thing,” “Crash” over “Brokeback Mountain,” or “Green Book” over “Roma” level. Still, before we spend the next few years and decades lamenting how “Sinners” faded to an unjust, unfair, or more offensive degree over the course of 2025, maybe spending the next few months keeping it from becoming so ignored, even as “One Battle After Another,” “Marty Supreme,” “Hamnet,” and others distract us in the meantime, would be worth at least trying first.

What do you think Warner Bros. will do this Oscar season between “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners?” Will they push both equally or will we see one emerge over the other? Please let us know in the comments section below and on Next Best Picture’s X account and check out the team’s latest Oscar predictions here.

You can follow Robert and hear more of his thoughts on the Oscars & Film on X @Robertdoc1984

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