Black Panther is a conditional success

So, the numbers are in, and it can be said with little chance of contradiction that the latest Marvel Studios movie, Black Panther, will make a lot of money.  An obscene amount of money.  Executives at Marvel will be swimming in piles of gold coins, just like Scrooge McDuck. 

Reports on the first weekend's box office estimate a weekend total of $235 million, slightly eclipsing the February record set just last year by Deadpool at $152 million on President’s Day weekend.  Black Panther made $25.2 million on Thursday, which is only slightly less than the $27.2 million that I, Tonya made in its entire 2017 run.

Most of the ink discussing the movie’s prodigious opening weekend have pointed out that what is remarkable is not just the size of the take, but the fact that for years Hollywood has said (quietly, not always openly) that films starring African-American actors and directed by African-American directors don’t do that well at the box office.

The very fact that we are talking about Black Panther breaking the February box office record reveals the fact that the studio had little faith in the film’s success.  If they knew it would open this big, they would have either held it until the summer, when they presumably could make even more money (and also siphon money away from other studio’s blockbusters), or they would have rushed it out in December and hope to pick up a few Oscar nominations, at least in the technical categories (although Wonder Woman’s inexplicable shut out of technical nominations indicates that may be harder than expected).

Black Panther beats the February box office record of Deadpool, which was another comic book movie dumped into the ghetto of February.  Deadpool’s sin wasn’t having African-Americans in the cast, but being an R-rated, mostly comedic, film filled with foul language and graphic violence.  Marvel’s mission statement must be something about producing family friendly entertainment where none of the consequences of mutant-on-mutant violence are ever shown in any detail.  If the studio had faith in Deadpool they would have made it their summer tent pole; as it was they hedged their bets and released it in the off-season, and had a $152 million opening weekend as a reward.

Black Panther’s release in February has a parallel in television.  Everyone remembers the epic television event that was Roots back in 1977.  The show smashed every ratings record in the books at the time, with over half the TV sets in America tuned in for the final chapter.  However, in a move that cost ABC millions of dollars, the show was dumped on to TVs in the doldrums of January, when there was almost no competition; if ABC had pulled in the same ratings during the February sweeps month, they could have charged much higher advertising fees for their programming.  According to a trivia item at IMDB, ABC admitted they showed the episodes on consecutive nights not to build an audience, but to dump the show as fast as possible because they thought no one would watch a story about an African-American’s search for his family tree.

Maybe the success of Black Panther will make studio executives re-examine their ideas that people won’t go and see films by African-American directors starring African-American actors.  But I doubt it.  Ideas about what audiences want are deeply ingrained in studio executives, and they rarely change their minds even in the presence of facts to the contrary.

It’s like a story I read about Christopher Nolan’s film Inception.  When it was announced that Warner Bros. was financing a film that was neither a sequel nor was based on a comic book, skeptics said they were doing only to keep the director of the Batman films happy.  When the film got good reviews, they said that was a fluke and it still wouldn’t make money.  After a non-comic book non-sequel grossed nearly $300 million domestically, the skeptics said fine, but Nolan couldn’t do it again.

Black Panther had to overcome a lot of obstacles.  In addition to the bias against films featuring African-American actors and directors, it also featured a protagonist whose secret identity was co-opted by a revolutionary organization in the 1960’s, and there was also an attempt to use social media to lower the movie’s Rotten Tomato score, but that didn't go very well.

With all the back-slapping over the success of a movie with a primarily Black cast (can I drop the “African-American” nomenclature since I don’t think all those actors are American?), the fact is that one reason for its success was that Marvel Studios had so little faith in the film they dumped it into theaters when there was little competition.  I am skeptical this means major change in Hollywood, but I do suspect that Black Panther 2 will get a release date closer to Memorial Day than to a holiday associated with mattress sales.

Let's talk seriously about The Good Place

Let’s talk seriously about The Good Place

NBC’s The Good Place just wrapped up its second season, with a third in the offing.  Who says intelligently written comedies with a moral center can’t succeed on network television?  And what does it mean that I only watch two comedies on broadcast TV, and they are both created by Michael Schur (the other one being Brooklyn Nine-Nine)?  (Okay, I’ll admit I do still watch Modern Family and Big Bang Theory, but after so many years that is muscle memory, not conscious choice).

I do love The Good Place, with its intricate plotting, visual puns, three dimensional characters and completely gonzo sensibilities.  I think it is a sign of how well constructed the characters are that I can simultaneously ‘ship Eleanor and Chidi, Eleanor and Jason, Jason and Janet, and Eleanor and Tahani (my personal favorite).  The only dyad I can’t ‘ship is Tahani and Jason, which just feels like it would be awkward for both of them.

But as we delve more deeply into the actual machinations of, well, The Bad Place, the less sense it makes.  Not that network TV comedies HAVE to make sense (on Big Bang Theory, how can Raj be a prominent astrophysicist at a prestigious research university whose father paid all his bills for several years, and yet be poor?).   Take it as a sign of respect that I even have expectations that The Good Place’s moral compass should point to true north.  Or magnetic north, whichever makes the analogy work.

My first criticism is that, according to Michael’s first simulation of The Good Place, every action a person makes on Earth is allotted points, either positive or negative, depending on how the action affects others.  I am going to assume that this was NOT part of the artificial construction of Michael’s experiment Neighborhood 12358W, that Michael was telling the truth about the nature of the afterlife but was lying only about Eleanor’s, Tahani’s, Chidi’s, and Jason’s final score.  The best way to sell a lie is to make it as close to the truth as possible.

This means that individuals are evaluated on a continuum, with scores ranging from negative millions (Hitler) to positive multi-millions (Beyoncé).  Given the fine, granular nature of such an evaluation process, why is the resulting judgment binary, either Bad Place or Good Place?  The vast majority of Earth’s inhabitants have neither committed genocide, nor prevented genocide.  Most people have held doors for others (3 points) and occasionally prepared fish in an office microwave (negative a lot).  Assuming a bell-shaped curve distribution, the average point total is probably zero with one standard deviation around . . . oh let’s say 500 points.  Your view of mankind’s nature will cause you to pick an alternate average and decide if the curve is skewed instead of being bell-shaped.

If this is so, then why make the operational decision at the extremes?  In other words, as the show itself has asked, why isn’t there a Medium Place for all the people who are, in fact, medium?  Why isn’t there an infinite number of Places based on every possible final score?

The next question is why is the default for most people is, seemingly, The Bad Place?  The standards for getting into The Good Place seem incredibly high.  No US President other than Abraham Lincoln made it?  Jimmy Carter worked with Habitat for Humanity when he was in his 70’s (maybe older).  Dwight Eisenhower defeated the Nazi’s in World War II and had no hint of scandal in his politics.  I would think beating the Nazis would get you a boatload of points, but apparently not enough.

Look at the four individuals caught up in Michael’s experiment.  The worst of the four is probably Jason, a dimwitted buffoon prone to solving problems with arson and petty theft.  Chidi’s main sin was indecision, which is hardly one of the Seven Deadly ones, and which he paid for during his lifetime by alienating friends and lovers (and during which he instructed students on Moral Philosophy!).  Tahani is a pretentious snob and name dropper whom, we have learned, was not sexually promiscuous (other than snogging Ryan Gosling a couple of times) and who raised 60 billion dollars for charity.  Okay, her motive was to get acclaim, but she could have raised the money and spent it on herself instead of helping others (and $60 billion is a LOT of help).

Then there is Eleanor, who is hardly a “monster” as she describes herself.  Yes, she is self-centered, hedonistic, unreliable, and opportunistic, but she was raised by two absentee parents who essentially forced her to declare her emancipation and fend for herself at age 14.  The flower grows where the seed is planted, and it is hard to imagine a child raised in that environment turning out to be Florence Nightingale (who, by the way, didn’t make it to The Good Place).

None of these four did anything that would warrant eternal damnation in a fair and just system, yet here they are.  Is this just the writers of The Good Place having sport, or is it a deeper commentary on the irrationality of the afterlife beliefs of most major organized religions?

So, we are to believe that anyone who does not meet the astonishingly high standards of The Good Place is condemned for eternity to The Bad Place?  This does not seem like a system designed to distribute justice in the afterlife.  If you are a Kalahari bushman, or a Mongolian shepherd, or a banker in Timbuktu, you have to find a way to stop world hunger while remaining humble, or you’ll be physically tortured for eternity? 

Those in The Good Place must have really lame parties, because there won’t be a very sizable attendance (and given how few women have historically had the opportunity to achieve major policy outcomes, one suspects the male to female ratio is quite high).  Probably nobody brings a keg, either.

Of course my critique just ties into the existential absurdism at the moral center of The Good Place.  The afterlife can be portrayed as absurd because it IS absurd.  Showing an afterlife that was logical and sensible would be no fun at all.  Sort of like the Episcopalian concept of The Good Place.