Ryan Coogler said an unlikely childhood favorite helped shape the cultural frame for his new film “Sinners.” 

While on a panel at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles, the director revealed that the 2001 Disney Channel Original Movie “The Luck of the Irish” sparked his family’s curiosity about links between Irish and Black traditions — a seed that later informed the film’s creative approach. 

“That was our first introduction to some of the similarities in Irish folk music to, basically, our music,” he told Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr. “There’s a small Irish community in the Bay, and we would talk about it. That movie was kind of a touchpoint for us to jump off of, crazy enough. We’ve been fascinated with that culture in my family.” 

Coogler laughed when an audience member said she’d worked on the Disney film; he replied, “God bless you,” and added, “There's a lot of fans of you in Oakland, California, right now. We used to watch that movie like crazy.” 

“Sinners” centers on twin brothers Stack and Smoke — both played by Michael B. Jordan — who return home in 1932 to open a juke joint that turns into the vampire antagonist Remmick’s hunting ground. Coogler said the Disney connection helped inform Remmick’s backstory and the way the film layers Irish and Black mythologies rather than flattening them into simple villainy. 

“The film was a great opportunity,” said Coogler. “It was also a big shoutout to Bram Stoker, who was Irish, and kind of gave us the first context around the concept of a vampire in popular culture. So it just made a lot of sense to explore the character that way. He’s not Satan, but we saw him as a pre-colonial Irishman who had this massive backstory that we would kind of hint at and peel back like an onion.”

He also praised his cast and called Jack O'Connell aka “the great Jack O'Connell,” and said O’Connell delivered a “beautiful performance” and “brought the memory of his father to the role, the same way that I brought the memory of my uncle.” Coogler loved O’Connell’s ownership of the role. And Coogler also confirmed what many fans have been waiting to hear: “Black Panther 3” is on the way.