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Michael B. Jordan Did the Impossible
In an era of mounting crises in Hollywood, the Sinners star got people off their couches and into theaters.
He’d also just wrapped up the promotional tour for Sinners, the hit $341 million–grossing vampire thriller that sparked countless think pieces about race, appropriation, and cunnilingus; the kind of culturally dominant movie discourse that hasn’t been seen swirling around an original film since Jordan Peele’s Get Out introduced “the Sunken Place” into the lexicon eight years ago. But the hidden terms of the offer soon come into focus: The leader of the vampires, a white ghoul named Remmick (Jack O’Connell), wants to use the power of the blues to commune with his ancestors, which he can accomplish only by subsuming the Black musicians and entrepreneurs into his undead horde, stripping them of their humanity and severing them from their culture. A gifted actor seen as having franchise-headlining potential, his celebrated indie role in 2019’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco led to an HBO series, Lovecraft Country, before Marvel handed him the proverbial keys to the car by casting him in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania as Kang, the villain around whom the studio’s next phase of productions was supposed to revolve.
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