The following post contains SPOILERS for Sinners. If you’re wondering on a basic information level if Sinners has a post-credits scene: Yes, it actually has two. There’s one after the first batch of credits and one at the very end of the film. You’re welcome.
It looks like Ryan Coogler is done making Marvel movies, at least for a while. His first post-Marvel project, Sinners, is far from the sort of film the studio would produce; a vampire tale that also mixes in social commentary and music — so much music, in fact, that it arguably qualifies as a full-blown musical. Sinners also contains more explicit sexual content than every single film and television series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe combined.
In short, Sinners is the work of a big-budget filmmaker freed from the creative restraints of IP moviemaking. At the same time, Coogler clearly took some lessons from his tenure at Marvel, none more important than this: Always leave the audience with one final post-credits scene to think about as they’re leaving the theater.
In Marvel films, that’s typically a scene that teases (or sometimes the full-blown trailer for) the next film in the MCU. In Sinners, Cooglar applied a similar technique for a slightly different purpose, providing an epilogue to his story and tying a bow around the themes that have bubbled beneath its bloody surface.
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Before those credits scenes unfold, Sinners is essentially a horror film about a group of men and women trapped inside a juke joint in rural Mississippi in the 1930s. A vampire named Remmick (Jack O’Connell) targets the bar because of the presence of a blues prodigy named Sammie (Miles Caton), the cousin of the establishment’s two owners, twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan).
Over the course of a long night, Remmick and his followers kill and transform most of the juke joint’s staff and patrons, including Stack and his ex-girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), before Smoke manages to stab Remmick with a stake. The first rays of morning sunlight then finish him and the rest of his followers off, while Smoke later dies fighting the KKK members who sold him the building where he and Stack built their bar. That leaves Sammie as the lone survivor; he drives out of Mississippi to pursue his musical career. Roll credits.
Then the epilogue hits. Sammie is now an old man — played by real-life blues guitarist Buddy Guy. After a gig in a blues club in 1992, Sammie is sitting at the bar when who should walk in but a still-youthful (and still-vampiric) Stack and Mary. Coogler was careful to include a brief moment during the big climax (easily forgotten in all the violent chaos) where the pair plan their escape, and Coogler never shows them burning along with Remmick and his other followers either.
Stack claims that Smoke allowed him to live — after he promised never to threaten Sammie again. He then offers to turn Sammie into a vampire — to give this aging master everlasting life to make music as long as he wants — but Sammie turns him down. The vampires accept his choice and leave Sammie unharmed, but before they depart Stack and Sammie agree about one thing: The big night where they opened the juke joint; the night where Sammie played for the first time, and Stack got to briefly enjoy his dream of owning his own bar before he was turned into a vampire, was the best day of both of their lives.
If you leave as soon as the credits roll — and I witnessed a couple of colleagues do precisely that at the Sinners press screening — you’ve watched a very effective and thematically rich survival horror film. If you stay for that extra scene, you see that Sinners is a lot more than that.
The mid-credits scene shows that Sammie didn’t squander his gifts after this fateful night. He achieved his goals, which means the sacrifices made to help Sammie survive — both the literal ones in that juke joint and the more symbolic ones about helping a poor African American kid who wants to leave home and make something of himself — were not in vain.
What you’re left with, then, is a revisionist (and more vampiric) take on the classic legend of bluesman Robert Johnson, who supposedly struck a deal with the devil at a Mississippi crossroads: His soul in exchange for musical genius. (The fact that the legend is patently false — Johnson learned guitar from another local musician — has done little to diminish it.)
Coogler’s film opens with a narration that explicitly mentions folklore about the connection between transcendent music and the supernatural, and the rest of Sinners contains other nods to Johnson myths as well. One account of Johnson’s death, for instance, claims he was poisoned by the husband of a woman he flirted with at a dance. In Sinners, both Sammie and Stack flirt with (and, uh, do a whole lot more than flirt with) married women at a dance, with disastrous consequences for most of the parties involved.
In Coogler’s twist of this sort of American myth, Sammie’s talent is given by God, not the devil. The supernatural monster craves the artist’s talent, rather than bestows it. (Interestingly, the monster claims to only want to assimilate the artist into its collective, as if the Borg from Star Trek were, like, super into Delta blues.) Becoming a great artist in Coogler’s formulation, then, is not about a demonic cheat code; it’s about survival and endurance, and avoiding the temptation to sell out to the collective. Without that epilogue during the credits, very little of that gets communicated.
There’s a lot more going on in Sinners. This is a movie about the Jim Crow era, and dreams, and the nature of sin. It’s also a movie with remarkable music, much of it performed by Caton, including in the second of Sinners’ two post-credits scenes, when he sings a solo rendition of “This Little Light of Mine,” emphasizing several of those aforementioned themes.
But Sinners is also a very satisfying entertainment filled with scares and suspense and a couple big laughs. And these days, just about every Hollywood entertainment is required to include at least one post-credits scene. Marvel has conditioned audiences for big-budget movies to expect them, and most other studio franchises have followed suit.
That could be why this is my favorite aspect of Sinners; the way Coogler uses the structure of a modern blockbuster not to tease some needless sequel but to leap decades into the future to wrap up both his protagonist’s tale and his larger message. He sends you out of the theater with the thrill of this unexpected gesture. Instead of speculating about some movie that’s coming out in two years, you exit into the lobby basking in the glow of what happens when a talented director is given the freedom to tell the story — just one story — they want to tell.
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