Ryan Coogler’s Sinners was one of 2025’s biggest gambits, with a $90 million budget seeming excessive for an R-rated original horror film. Yet, the movie went on to haul in a $370 million total worldwide gross, making it the highest-grossing original movie of the 2020s and the first original film to cross $300 million globally since Avatar. The box office success alone would have been remarkable enough, but the critical response matched the commercial one. Beyond collecting trophies and nominations in every major award in the industry, Sinners broke the record for nominations in a single year with 16 nods at the 98th Academy Awards, surpassing the 14-nomination mark that had been shared by All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land for decades. Sinners even earned nominations across four of the Big Five awards, missing only a nod for Best Lead Actress.
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Sadly, the Oscars ultimately belonged to One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s political thriller, which led all films with six wins, including Best Picture and Best Director.For Sinners, the haul was four trophies, and that number obscures how close the film came to the biggest prizes. The wins that did come were decisive, however. Ryan Coogler took Best Original Screenplay for his first career Oscar, Ludwig Göransson won Best Original Score, and Autumn Durald Arkapaw made history by becoming the first woman to win Best Cinematography. Finally, Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor for his dual performance as Smoke and Stack. This was Jordan’s first career Academy Award nomination, and his victory put him in a select group of performers that, across nearly a century of Oscar history, has almost no members.
Michael B. Jordan Is the First Best Actor to Win for a Horror Performance This Century
The last time the Academy awarded its Best Actor prize to a performer in a horror film, Anthony Hopkins collected the trophy at the 64th Academy Awards in 1992 for his portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. That win stood for 34 years as a lone island in a category that has otherwise maintained a firm wall between prestigious acting recognition and genre filmmaking. In fact, Jordan’s victory at the 98th Academy Awards is only the third time in the award’s 97-year history that a male performer has taken Best Actor for a horror role. Beyond Hopkins, at the 5th Academy Awards in 1932, Fredric March won Best Actor for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, sharing the prize with Wallace Beery in what became a landmark in genre recognition.
In nearly 100 years of Oscar history, the entire horror genre has earned fewer nominations than some fan-favorite performers, and only two horror films have ever won Best Picture: The Silence of the Lambs and The Shape of Water. Acting nominations for horror performers have been even rarer, and when the Academy does nominate a horror role, it often refuses to call the film horror at all, treating genre elements as incidental to performances it wants to claim for prestige filmmaking. Jordan’s win for Sinners is notable specifically because Sinners is unambiguously a horror film, a vampire film set in the Jim Crow South, with Coogler leaning fully into the genre’s dread. The 2026 ceremony did provide one additional horror bright spot beyond Jordan’s win. Amy Madigan’s Best Supporting Actress victory for her role as witch Aunt Gladys in Weapons marked another genre breakthrough on the same night, making the 98th Academy Awards the first ceremony in decades where horror acting was recognized twice.
The female side of the ledger is even shorter. Kathy Bates won Best Actress for Misery at the 1991 ceremony, playing Annie Wilkes in Rob Reiner’s Stephen King adaptation and becoming the first woman to win that prize for a horror performance. The following year, Jodie Foster won Best Actress at the same ceremony where Hopkins took Best Actor, both for The Silence of the Lambs. Other horror actresses were snubbed by the Oscars. Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie both earned Best Actress nominations for Carrie in 1976, with neither winning. Sigourney Weaver also received a nomination for Aliens that went unclaimed. Finally, mind-blowing performances such as Toni Collette in Hereditary and Florence Pugh in Midsommar didn’t even get nominated.
Jordan’s performance as twin brothers Smoke and Stack demanded the kind of technical and emotional range that the Academy has historically rewarded in actors working in prestige drama. Still, that the performance arrived inside a genre film, and that the Academy recognized it as such, represents a meaningful shift. Hopefully, the Academy is ready to expand its recognition of genre movies in the upcoming years.
Sinners is streaming on HBO Max.
Do you think Jordan’s Best Actor win signals a permanent shift in how the Academy evaluates horror performances, or was Sinners singular enough to be a one-time exception? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
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