Skip to main content
Filmarian
All films
Poster for Brown Sugar
Sign in to rateBe the first to rate
+ write a review
Released
2002 · FILM

Brown Sugar

A lifelong friendship and a shared love for hip-hop bring a disillusioned record executive and a passionate music critic back to their roots, where they must choose between their careers and the truth of their hearts.

“When did you first fall in love with hip-hop?”

Directed by
Rick Famuyiwa
Written by
Michael Elliot, Rick Famuyiwa
Runtime
109 min
ComedyDramaMusic

Synopsis

Sidney and Dre credit their enduring friendship and the beginnings of their careers to a single moment from their childhood: witnessing the birth of hip-hop on a New York street corner. Fifteen years later, Sidney has become a respected music critic for a national magazine, while Dre is a successful but unfulfilled executive at a hip-hop record company. Both come to understand that their true passions in life can only be realized by recalling the lessons they learned that day on the corner.

Credits

Actors
Editor
Production Designer
Director of Photography
Writers
Director

Related titles

No curated related titles yet. Use the edit affordance to add "More from this director", "Same franchise", or "Adaptation source material" entries — every change goes through the wiki review queue.

How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 19

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Edited by Dirk WesterveltShot by Jeff BarnettScored by Robert HurstDesigned by Kalina Ivanov

Box Office

2002 · Box office

✅ Made its money back — grossed 3.4× its budget

Why 2.5×?

Cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket sold, and a wide release’s marketing often costs about as much again as the film — so a movie needs to gross around 2.5× its production budget just to break even theatrically. It’s a rule of thumb, not the studio’s ledger (home video and streaming come later).

Worldwide gross

$27.4M

Budget$8.0M
Worldwide gross$27.4M
break-even (2.5×)

Opening weekend: $10.7M — 39% of its US run. Front-loaded — most of its money arrived opening weekend.

Opening week (7-day): $13.3M — 49% of its US & Canada run.

Peak 1,372 theaters

Community tags

Be the first to tag this page — tags appear right away. Try a theme, capability, or subject (e.g. WWII, heist, slow burn, time travel, A24).

Help complete this page

We’re missing mpaa rating. Sign in to add what you know.