Ryan Coogler Spills the Tea on What Smoke and Stack Were Up to Before ‘Sinners’

With Sinners being the history-making belle of the ball this Oscar season, regardless of whether it sweeps or not (fingers crossed it does), interest in the film has all but reignited among fans with Ryan Coogler‘s period piece vampire film. While Coogler has been pretty guarded over revealing what he meant in making the film, wanting it to speak for itself, and shutting down any internet rumors of a sequel, he has lifted the veil to reveal what Michael B. Jordan’s color-coordinated twins were up to before the events of the movie.

Speaking with Proximity Media, Coogler detailed what Smoke and Stack were up to years before the twins left for Chicago and made their grand homecoming, kicking off the vampiric festivities of Sinners. While the film detailed some of those details all its own, noting that they duped Italian and Irish gangs, one of which was Al Capone’s, fleeing with their money, liquor, guns, and decadent suits, Coogler set his backstory sights a bit further back with what happened after Smoke murdered their father. Spoilers for a movie a lot of you already saw.

“They killed their father, hid out at Mary’s mom’s place, then went to New York and joined the military,” Coogler said. “Went to fight in France, and they went back home for a little bit. Mary was older, so that was when Stack and Mary happened.”

But wait, there’s more: “It was like a three-year run where the twins had basically broken up. Smoke and Annie got their house, and Stack and Mary went to Little Rock. When [Smoke and Annie] lost their daughter was when things got rocky; they both basically left their partners and went to Chicago.

SINNERS lore unlocked 🤫🔓 pic.twitter.com/Moq4MpEBAg

— PROXIMITY MEDIA (@proximitymedia) January 27, 2026

And the rest, as they say, was history, with the film picking up as the twins returned home to kick off their doomed juke joint. While it’s usually the role of fan fiction writers to fill in the gaps in stories that left it all on the table, it is nice that Coogler decided to info-dump us like cinema’s Santa Claus with more deets on the twins’ lives.

If not for the fact that we got a little more information with which we can read between the lines over why their relationships with Annie and Mary, and by proxy their partner’s hard feelings toward each other, were so strained by the start of the film, it’ll at least cut Hollywood off at the chase of trying to entertain the idea of spinning the block and pitching a prequel to a movie 1) Coogler will own the rights to 2) Doesn’t need one. We will, however, accept an animated prequel in the style of the film’s opening sequence, should Coogler feel so inclined.

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