Crafty Theft and the End of Screenplay Amnesia
When IP Became the Product, Hollywood’s Quiet Borrowing Became Visible
There’s a conversation making the rounds right now about Sinners and whether it borrows too heavily from earlier works—comics, films, folklore. The usual internet exercise is underway: line up characters, match situations, count the overlaps, and declare victory.
That’s not how I read it.
I’ve been through those gates. NBC. DreamWorks. Disney-adjacent rooms where the work is fast, collaborative, and often built on a foundation no one is particularly interested in auditing too closely. For a long time, screenplays were treated as process material—detritus on the way to a finished product. The film was the asset. The script was scaffolding.
And scaffolding doesn’t get inspected unless it collapses.
So what happens? Writers read—sometimes deeply, often not. They skim. They extract. They remember tones, character types, situations. They pull what works. They recombine. They move forward. And as long as the final structure stands and nobody recognizes the beams, it’s called craft.
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes it’s just well-dressed theft.
The current conversation around Sinners is interesting not because it proves anything in a legal sense—it doesn’t—but because it reveals something in a structural sense. When you see multiple specific elements align across works—archetypes, dynamics, staging—you’re not necessarily looking at coincidence. You’re looking at shared source material being processed through the same industrial method: extraction, recombination, and presentation.
Hollywood has lived comfortably in that space for decades.
But something has changed.
IP is no longer downstream of the product. IP is the product. And once that shift happens, people start checking receipts. Not just lawyers—audiences. Readers. Communities who recognize when their cultural materials are being handled with care…or stripped for parts.
That’s the distinction I care about. Bronzeville invests in IP. We have since Grandpa Gardner kept the Chicago Daily Defender afloat. I have since How U Like Me Now. I publish authors who trust me with their performance rights value.
We don’t care about influence, homage, or even similarity.
Authorship.
I came up writing something of my own from the kernel to the cob. My character, Elliot Caprice, debuted in the first book in the series, A Negro and an Ofay, began as a college screenplay—Elliot Caprice and the Death of Bernie Mac. It was my take on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, sure, but the voice, the structure, the engine of it—that was mine. I can account for it. Every piece of it.
Most screenwriters can’t say that cleanly. Not because they lack talent, but because the system they’re trained in doesn’t require it. That’s why those you think are better than you sit before an entire wall of books they’ve opened once and put back.
They don’t have to originate. They have to assemble convincingly.
That model worked when nobody was looking too closely.
It won’t hold much longer.
So when I look at something like Sinners, I’m not asking, “Is this plagiarism?” That’s a courtroom question.
I’m asking, “Does this clear the bar of authorship?”
Because not every influence is theft.
But not every homage is honest either.
And in the era we’re entering, that difference is going to matter more than it ever has.
VTY, dg