When I left the movie theater after a 10 pm show back in April 2025, I felt energized. I had just come from seeing Sinners, glued to my seat until the post-credits scene rolled and raving about the film with my sister. We agreed that we had never experienced anything like Ryan Coogler’s genre-bending masterpiece in theaters before. Before the awards conversation even began, we were already dreaming up a sequel to the period piece.
More than anything, Sinners rekindled my craving for specifically Black media across genres, and after scrolling on TikTok, I realized I wasn’t the only one. We are craving the vast Black media landscape of the ‘90s, and it isn’t just about chasing that feeling of nostalgia for a simpler time. We’re craving the feeling of having options in Black media again.
This year, Black cinema has been on a roll. Each film that I checked off my theater watchlist so far has felt distinct in its visuals and storytelling. Over the span of a few weeks, I reveled in the feel-good energy of MIchael and You, Me & Tuscany; the campy visuals in the deeply political I Love Boosters; and the southern grittiness of revenge thriller Is God Is. From experienced filmmakers like Boots Riley to Aleshea Harris making her film only a handful of months ago, every idea on screen was rooted in each storyteller’s creative vibe. This stretch has felt like the Black movie landscape that our parents experienced in the ‘90s; movies like House Party, Malcolm X, Poetic Justice, and Set It Off (just to name a few) debuted within a few years of each other.
Black audiences want to open this new door of diversity even further. In anticipation of You, Me & Tuscany’s opening weekend in theaters in April, Black creators were pushing for audiences to buy a ticket rather than wait for the film to arrive on streaming (the film debuted in fourth place in the box office). It was a push to support and champion different types of Black films to “prove” there’s room for more variety in Black projects. There’s an undeniable appetite for these options to be greenlit and funded by big studio gatekeepers so we can see ourselves on screen in every genre.
One TikTok user put this longing into words, asking, “Where did we go wrong? Where are these stories that we’re craving about the Black experience in Gen Z?” In this era of Gen Z yearning for more connection outside of our online world, I see young Black women rejecting the idea of having to “hold it down” in a relationship, aka sacrificing for our partner without a sense of partnership. We are actively searching for media that reflect this attitude shift, and as one other TikTok account declared, “We don’t want struggle love. We want something cutesy, fun, has all the good feels.”
Black women in particular have been very vocal in turning away from the seemingly endless queue of movies that embrace the dreaded “struggle love” and romances based in trauma, like 2019’s Queen & Slim, 2021’s Malcolm & Marie, and a host of Tyler Perry movies. These films left viewers exhausted from watching hours of content where Black women endure hardship for a happy ending, or worse, settling for less than what they deserve. Watching You, Me & Tuscany’s Halle Bailey, whose character Anna was allowed to be mischievous, flirty, and (most importantly) desirable, run passionately through vineyards proves that we can have Black romance leads in playful roles.
It isn’t just women or the new generation of Black audiences with movie-ticket money turning away from these films, either. While being bombarded with AI slop on nearly every corner of the internet has certainly intensified the yearning for original creativity on social media (remember the backlash to the “Fruit Love Island” clips), the Black community has been having this conversation for a minute. We’re burnt out from the string of films in the 2010s that focused on telling stories of Black struggle and survival. The Help and 12 Years a Slave dominated the awards conversation after coming out in 2011 and 2013, respectively. Even 2016’s Hidden Figures (a film I love with all my heart) now mainly lives on in pop culture and TikTok sounds thanks to the famous “coffee pot” monologue. There’s absolutely room for these films to exist in theaters since they touch on important parts of history that should never be erased, but we’re tired of accepting these types of films as our sole options in theaters.
Sinners proved that the risk of betting on fresh voices in the Black community can pay off dramatically. While all eyes were rightfully on Michael B. Jordan holding his award for Best Actor at the Academy Awards in March, I was ecstatic for Coogler when his script took home the award for Best Original Screenplay. It’s a glimmer of hope that the critics that hold so much power in the industry are starting to see the value in variety, too.