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.