The Disney Classic That Sparked Ryan Coogler’s Vampire Epic Sinners

File this one under delightful curveballs: Ryan Coogler says a Disney Channel Original Movie helped shape the vampire mythology in his 1930s-set thriller, Sinners. Yes, really.

How a DCOM fed a 1930s vampire story

During a Deadline Contenders panel on November 15, 2025, Coogler explained that Disney Channel's 2001 movie The Luck of the Irish nudged him toward some of Sinners' core ideas. It sparked his early curiosity about overlaps between Irish tradition and Black culture, and it stuck with him enough to become an actual touchstone while he was building the film's main antagonist, Remmick, played by Jack O'Connell.

Coogler said the DCOM even tuned his ear to echoes between Irish folk music and the sounds he grew up around. That made sense to him because there was a small Irish community in the Bay Area when he was coming up, which led to a lot of conversations at home about shared cultural threads. At the panel, he spotted someone in the crowd who had worked on the DCOM, gave them a warm shout-out, and noted the film had a real following in Oakland. Translation: he and his people watched it a lot.

The reference point, if your Disney file is rusty

• The Luck of the Irish (2001): A Disney Channel movie about Kyle O'Reilly Johnson, a high school basketball player who has to get his family's stolen gold coin back from a villainous leprechaun. Directed by Paul Hoen, written by Andrew Price and Mark Edward Edens, and all about heritage and identity. Not exactly a vampire primer, but thematically right in Coogler's wheelhouse.

So where does that show up in Sinners?

Sinners centers on twin brothers, Stack and Smoke, played by Michael B. Jordan, who return to their Mississippi hometown in 1932. The juke joint they run turns into the hunting ground for O'Connell's Remmick. Coogler built the movie as a nod to Bram Stoker, who, as he put it:

"gave us the first context around the concept of a vampire in popular culture."

Remmick himself is written as a pre-colonial Irishman with a layered backstory. That is the kind of detail you do not expect to trace back to a Disney Channel movie, but here we are. Coogler praised O'Connell for delivering a nuanced turn and said the actor brought memories of his father into the performance. Coogler mirrored that on his side, using the project to honor his own uncle.

Bottom line: the influence chain here is wild at first glance, but it adds up once Coogler connects the dots between music, migration, and myth. The DCOM seeded questions about identity; Stoker provided the vampire framework; and Sinners filters both through 1932 Mississippi with a monster who feels rooted in real, specific history. Not the path I expected to a great screen villain, but I am not complaining.