Black Panther poised to shatter a Hollywood myth
The film is expected to take in at least $250 mn worldwide this weekend, disproving the notion that movies rooted in black culture cannot be global blockbusters
Ticket buyers around the world are poised to smash another one of Hollywood’s most entrenched beliefs.
Movies rooted in black culture cannot become global blockbusters? Guess again. The euphorically reviewed Disney-Marvel superhero movie Black Panther, with an almost entirely black cast and a powerful Afrocentric story line, is expected to take in at least $250 million worldwide between Friday and Monday, according to analyst projections. Fandango, the online ticketing site, said on Thursday that Black Panther was its No 4 pre-seller of all time, behind only the last three Star Wars movies.
An opening total in that range would put Black Panther on a course to become one of the year’s biggest hits — perhaps even approaching the blockbuster status attained last summer by another Hollywood myth-buster, Wonder Woman. That Warner Bros film ultimately collected $821.8 million worldwide, ridding the movie business of the long-held notion that female superheroes don’t sell.
“One by one, these unwritten Hollywood rules about what audiences supposedly will and will not support are falling by the wayside,” said Jeff Bock, a senior analyst at Exhibitor Relations, an entertainment research firm. “I think about it like a wall crumbling. In terms of Black Panther, no studio can say again, ‘Oh, black movies don’t travel, overseas interest will be minimal.’”
Disney, which has been on a box office tear, decided several years ago to make a concerted effort to promote diversity and equality on screen. But Black Panther also arrives at a time when studios have started to respond to growing pressure to make their big-budget movies more inclusive, driven in part by the recent #OscarsSoWhite movement. And with audiences increasingly inclined to stay home and watch Netflix, producing movies featuring lead characters with different skin colours, genders and sexualities is proving to be good business.
Attendance at theatres in North America, the world’s largest movie market, dropped 6 per cent in 2017, hitting a 22-year low. At the same time, studios are more reliant than ever on ticket sales. Their home-entertainment businesses — negatively impacted by the rise of streaming services — are collapsing to an alarming degree. The major studios reported an 18 per cent drop in holiday home-video rental and sales revenue, including video-on-demand purchases, compared to a year earlier.
“Hollywood can no longer afford to take any moviegoer for granted,” Bock said. “That is causing them to look at underserved groups where there is pent-up demand, and the black audience is one.”
Disney, which spent roughly $350 million to make and market Black Panther, remains cautious about declaring global victory, noting that the film will not arrive in crucial markets like China and Japan until next month. The movie, focused on one of Marvel’s lesserknown superheroes and set in the fictional country of Wakanda, will be playing in 70 per cent of the world by Friday, with its roll- out having started on Tuesday in the United Kingdom.
But even if Black Panther stumbles in some countries, it will easily become the top-grossing film by a black director and with a largely black cast in Hollywood history, surpassing Straight Outta Compton, which took in $214 million worldwide in 2015, after adjusting for inflation. Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler, will also break box office records in North America, where ticket sales between Friday and Monday are expected to total about $165 million, an astounding start for a film released outside the holiday and summer corridors.
The record-holder for a February release is Deadpool, which arrived to an adjusted $159 million in 2016 and itself challenged conventional wisdom, proving that an Rrated superhero movie could strike a broad chord. Deadpool went on to collect an adjusted $819 million for 20th Century Fox, which will release a sequel in May.
Another test will come on March 16, when 20th Century Fox releases Love, Simon, a $17million romantic comedy centred on a gay teenager. Studios have long insisted that multiplex crowds will not support same-sex love stories, dismissing Brokeback Mountain, which took in $231 million in 2005 for Focus Features, after adjusting for inflation, as an Oscar-boosted exception to the rule. Fox is the first major studio to take a chance on a movie anchored by a gay character in memory.
“I’m done living in a world where I don’t get to be who I am,” Nick Robinson, playing the lead role, says in the Love, Simon trailer. “I deserve a great love story.”
Studio chiefs keep their jobs by delivering hits, and they try to do that by avoiding constructs that have fizzled in the past. For years, female superheroes were held back by the argument — a ridiculous one in the eyes of many critics — that male ticket buyers would stay home if a woman led the action. The failures of the critically derided films Catwoman in 2004 and Elektra in 2005 were used as proof.