- Millennial American director Ryan Coogler was drowning in $200,000 of student loans when he started making Creed—now, a decade later, his new movie Sinners is taking in $121 million at the box office. Oprah Winfrey, Forever 21 cofounder Do Won Chang, and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky also found billion-dollar success out of their sticky situations.
Show up to any movie theater across America, and tickets to Sinners have already been swiped for the next two weeks. But just 10 years before the $121 million box office success broke the vampire horror genre, its director was drowning in student loans.
“I was 200 grand in debt for film school. It was bad,” Ryan Coogler revealed recently on the WTF With Marc Maron podcast. “We don’t come from no money.”
It was 2015, and Coogler was on the verge of breakout success—but his wallet didn’t show it.
At the time the director had already filmed the critically acclaimed film Fruitvale Station with Michael B. Jordan. With the A-list actor as his muse, the budding filmmaker took on the tall task of creating a Rocky spinoff series, also starring Jordan: Creed.
He began shooting the first movie in the series, which went on to make $42.6 million in its opening weekend on a $35 million budget.
But the $200,000 in student loans from attending Southern California’s School of the Cinematic Arts was still burning a hole in his pocket. “I wasn’t making no money,” he added.
The turning point for Coogler
The 38-year-old director’s win with Creed marked the first of many to come: Creed II and Creed III also shattered ticket sales expectations; Black Panther and its sequel Wakanda Forever did well over $2 billion at the worldwide box office; Judas and the Black Messiah was nominated many times for Golden Globes and Academy Awards; and now Sinners has brought in $121 million so far in global box offices.
While he didn’t confirm whether or not his student debt has been wiped clean yet (Fortune has reached out for comment), Coogler is far past worrying about his repayment plan.
After making some of the biggest superhero and sports films, his net worth is slated to be around $25 million. None of it may have ever happened if it weren’t for Coogler confiding in his girlfriend at the time—now wife—about how his creative-writing teacher recognized his potential as a screenwriter.
“[My wife] bought me a screenwriting software, Final Draft,” Coogler said. “I found something that I really loved.”
Billionaires who started out with sticky financial situations
Coogler’s start as a burgeoning creative riddled with debt isn’t an uncommon story. Some of the world’s most successful people have their own rags-to-riches story of how they managed to turn things around.
Queen of television Oprah Winfrey is known for her glitzy audience giveaways and sizable $3 billion net worth. She grew up in rural Mississippi in extreme poverty, raised by a single mother. Even when she discovered her passion for radio at just 17, she faced skepticism over her ability to anchor, deemed “unfit for television.” She was demoted from news to daytime TV—which actually proved to be a huge success for the media personality. Thus was born The Oprah Winfrey Show, which reeled in $300 million yearly during its peak. Winfrey later negotiated ownership of the series in 1986, solidifying that her run-ins with poverty would now be a thing of the past.
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Do Won Chang, cofounder and CEO of Forever 21, also had rocky beginnings before finding major success. He and his wife, Jin Sook, immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea—their first jobs in L.A. being dishwashing for a coffee shop, and manning a gas station on the side. Chang noticed that most of the men driving the snazziest cars worked in the garment industry, so he took a job at a clothing store. That was the start of his $81 billion love connection with fashion.
“I came here with almost nothing,” Chang said in an interview with Forbes. “I’ll always have a grateful heart toward America for the opportunities that it’s provided me.”
Airbnb’s Brian Chesky is worth nearly $10 billion today—and it’s a far cry from nearly living on the streets back in his twenties. In 2007, Chesky had a problem: He didn’t have enough to cover rent. So he and his roommates hatched a plan that would inspire his empire. They turned their apartment into a bed-and-breakfast, blowing up air mattresses to accommodate guests. Now the CEO’s short-term rental company is worth $78 billion.
“We’re conditioned to avoid taking risks at all the wrong times. Right after college, we’re told to do the safe thing,” Chesky wrote for Fortune in 2014. “But that’s not how life works, and it’s the wrong way to think about risk. Inevitably, things change as you get older.”
