The film directed by Ryan Coogler has broken the absolute record for nominations in the history of the Oscars. It is not a statistical accident: behind its success there is a wave of changes in the industry, seasoned by a decade of silent transformation of the horror genre, a business model with brutal returns and an exhausted industry that has been looking for years to see what comes after superheroes.
Victory at the Oscars. ‘Sinners’ (or ‘Los sinners’, as it has also been known in Spain) 0 heads the list of Oscar nominees in 2026 with 16 candidates. In fact tops the lists every year: the previous record was 14, shared between ‘Eve Naked’ (1950), ‘Titanic‘ (1997) and ‘La La Land’ (2016). Ryan Coogler received his first nominations for directing and original screenplay, and Michael B. Jordan, after more than a decade as a headliner, also earned his first nomination as an actor. These numbers aren’t just awards history: They’re a portrait of something broader that’s been moving beneath the surface of the industry for years.
The box office. ‘Sinners’ grossed more than $370 million on a budget of between $90 and $100, becoming the first original film to surpass $200 million in the United States alone since ‘Coco’. It is also the biggest box office success in original cinema (that is, one that does not belong to a franchise) since ‘Inception’, fifteen years ago. Coogler shot the film in Ultra Panavision 70 and IMAX, explicitly betting on the theater experience versus the streamingand precisely picking up the baton of another lover of large formats in cinemasChristopher Nolan.
Terror and Oscar. Before continuing, let’s make it clear that ‘Sinners’ is a horror film: of course, it has a component of social criticism about the role of African Americans in the culture of their country, but the message is part of the nature of genre cinema. ‘Sinners’ is a vampire movie before anything else. And from that perspective, it is worth noting that only six horror movies have received nominations for Best Picture. ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ among all of them, very notably, won the five main Oscars.
What has changed in the last decade is the appearance of a side of horror cinema more tolerated by the academy: they are films like ‘Hereditary’, ‘Midsommar’, ‘Babadook’, ‘The Witch’ or ‘Nope!’, often labeled under the loaded ‘high horror’ label. The 2026 Oscars are its first massive institutional recognition after the fantasy monopolized the nominations in 2025 with films like ‘Dune Part II’, ‘Wicked’ or ‘The Substance’.
Devastating at the box office. The blockbuster of ‘Sinners’ It was not an isolated phenomenon.. Horror was the genre with best relative performance of 2025: ’28 Years Later’, the latest ‘Final Destination’ or ‘Weapons’ generated the type of cultural conversation that until recently brought together superhero franchises. Some calculations say that the terror reached 12.1% of ticket sales in the United States in 2025, compared to 9.8% in 2024.
The business. The economy of terror explains much of the industry’s renewed interest: average a return on production costs 173%, the highest of any gender. Let’s remember hits like ‘Déjame exit’, which cost 4.5 million and grossed more than 250 million worldwide or ‘Smile’, produced for 17 million and which exceeded 200 at the box office. And they are not extraordinary or out of the ordinary examples: every year we have comparable figures, and always within the genre.
‘Sinners’, however, with its 90-100 million budget, broke the logic of “cheap horror.” Directors such as Robert Eggers, Julia Ducournau and Ari Aster, to name a fewhave been scaling budgets for years, following the path opened by Jordan Peele, who went from 4.5 million for ‘Let Me Out’ to 68 million for ‘Nope’ in just six years.
And what fails. The other side of the equation has to do with what is going wrong. Talking about how no gender is a guarantee of anything by itself.Mike Barstow, executive vice president of the ACX Cinemas chain, said that “people have not stopped wanting to see horror or superheroes, they have stopped wanting mediocre films about those worlds. They demand more quality.” And that means fewer clone franchises, although in 2025 the trend was still alive: only one original movie It was among the ten highest grossing films.
The canon of franchises and shared universes, which has dominated the industry for more than a decade, is facing IP saturation. Sequels, prequels, spin-offs and reboots have proliferated until the box office has begun to show signs of exhaustion. Horror, paradoxically, has been the refuge of originality for decades precisely because the big studios ignored it. The success of ‘Sinners’ does not show that the public only wants scary movies, but rather that they are betting on something intelligent, fresh and that does not seem assembled in a corporate laboratory.
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