INCLUSION PAYS OFF
Black Panther’s box-office win helps shatter myths about storytelling
A lavish, headline-grabbing première. Lightning word of mouth stoked by glowing reviews. Packed movie theatres with soldout shows, long lines and fans decked out as characters from the film.
The Black Panther phenomenon had the look and feel of a classic, bona fide blockbuster in route to its record-setting $201.8-million debut over the weekend, or an estimated $235 million Friday through Monday in Canada and the U.S. (all figures in U.S. dollars). Much has been made about the film industry ’s struggles to tap into pop culture the way it once more regularly did — that TV and streaming options and a dearth of fresh ideas have diminished the power of the big screen.
But when Hollywood does manufacture a must-see theatrical event, it has increasingly been propelled by the power of inclusivity. Just as Jordan Peele’s Oscar-nominated Get Out ($253 million worldwide on a $4.5 million production budget) and Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman ($821.1 million) did before it, Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther captured the zeitgeist by the potent combination of top-notch filmmaking (97 per cent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes), studio backing and an audience hungry to see itself represented on the big screen.
At the box office, inclusion is paying off big time.
“Diversity does in fact, sell,” said Darnell Hunt, a professor and director of social science at UCLA. “In hindsight, it’s kind of a nobrainer. The American public is about 40 per cent people of colour now, and we know that people of colour over-index in terms of media consumption.”
Black Panther debuted with $361 million in worldwide ticket sales, setting up the $200-million film for a theatrical run that should easily eclipse $1 billion. History is assured. Just months after Jenkins helmed the biggest box-office hit directed by a woman, Coogler will set a new mark for films directed by an African-American. The debut, the best ever for February, is the fifth-highest of all time, not accounting for inflation.
“If you want to succeed on the global stage,” said Dave Hollis, distribution chief for Disney, “certainly in the tent-pole business, you have to have diversity in storytelling, in the characters that you put in front of the camera, in the artisans you put behind the camera — to be able to get that better, richer storytelling and to drive huge results. The results speak for themselves.”
Hollis pointed to the many factors that made Black Panther a hit: Coogler’s direction, the stewardship of Kevin Feige’s Marvel, the reliability of the brand. But he also noted a developing pattern for Disney — that inclusive films are both richer for their diversity and, often, richer for the bottom line.
“It feels like the right thing to do. It makes for better, richer storytelling, and we’re a business. It’s something that’s just delivered big, huge box office,” said Hollis. “When we have leaned into and had inclusion and representation as part of the mix, it’s just really worked. When you think about Star Wars and Rogue One, the female protagonist leading those stories. Also Moana or Coco. Coco has been an absolute juggernaut.”
Coco, expected to win the Oscar for best animated feature next month, has made more than $730 million worldwide. It’s the biggest-budget release starring an all-Latino cast.
Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which has grossed $1.3 billion worldwide, did more than any previous Star Wars film to elevate its female characters, and featured the widely hailed breakout star Kelly Marie Tran.
By promoting diversity in its films, Disney has faced some backlash from social-media critics who deride films like The Last Jedi and Sony’s 2015’s female-led Ghostbusters as politically correct overreach. Some fans have even gone to the extraordinary length of trying to drive down audience scores for those films.
But consider the fate of movies that haven’t tried as hard to be culturally authentic. Paramount’s Ghost in the Shell, which stars Scarlett Johansson in a role originally written as a cyborg in a Japanese woman’s body, last year bombed at the box office after a backlash over Johansson’s casting.
Meanwhile, the diverse cast of Universal’s The Fast and the Furious films helped make it one of the most bankable franchises in movies. Other standout hits have included Girls Trip — the biggest comedy of 2017 — and Sony’s unexpectedly lucrative Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.
Jumanji has grossed more than $904 million worldwide, including more than a half a billion dollars overseas. The old argument that films starring African-American actors don’t travel well has never had a worse two months. Black Panther opened with $160 million abroad, even without several markets (China, Japan, Russia) yet open.
“Black Panther,” Hunt said, “can be an important first step toward really dispelling the myth that has held Hollywood back for generations in terms of telling the stories that we certainly want to see in this country but I think that the rest of the world wants to see, too.”