NFL owners think they own the players as well as the teams

There are some things you can always count on.  The Washington Generals will never beat the Harlem Globetrotters; The Washington Nationals will find a way not to make it to the World Series; and the Washington Capitals will choke in the playoffs (well, almost always).

Add to this list the following: NFL owners will always put their collective foot in their collective mouth.  Bill Veeck, the legendary owner of several Major League baseball teams, once said “Baseball must be a great game; the owners haven’t killed it yet.”  These days he’d be talking about owners in the NFL.

The latest outrage by the owners stems from the long-brewing controversy over some players kneeling during the national anthem, in protest of . . . well, it began about the fact that very often Caucasian police officers seem to find it necessary to use deadly force against young, unarmed African-American men, but after a while some players were simply protesting to protest the owners not supporting their protest. 

This is a situation where rational people could disagree, so the owners proceeded logically; they unilaterally imposed their decision on their NFL “partners.”  You often hear the phrase “planation mentality” to describe the NFL owners, but the phrase doesn’t mean they are racist.  They think they own not only the team, but also the players; not just the African-America players, they think they own the White players as well.

The owners, without even bothering to consult the players or the NFL Players’ Union, decided to resolve the issue by deciding that all players MUST show respect during the anthem on the field, and if they didn’t want to they could remain in the locker room.  The owners couldn’t punish the players without violating the Collective Bargaining Agreement, so they deigned that any violation would result in the team being fined.  Of course, if the team owner then wanted to fine the players, that was okay (wink, wink).

Note that the owners treat the players, who are supposed to be the owners’ partners in the NFL, as equipment that they can do what they will with.  Not only do they not even offer to engage in dialogue with the players or the union, but they then assume that teams can force their players to do whatever they want them to do regarding behavior before the game.

Not only is this incredibly disrespectful, but it is poking the bear.  Players who maybe were fine standing during the anthem might be provoked into doing something because of this heavy-handed approach by the owners.  Reaction by players has been varied, but many reacted angrily. Perhaps noteworthy was the response of Chris Long (who happens to be Caucasian) who chided the owners’ motives by proclaiming, “This is not patriotism.” 

The hypocrisy of the owners is demonstrated by an incident earlier this year, when college quarterback Josh Allen was found to have made racist tweets when in high school.   One owner said, after Allen apologized, that it wouldn’t be a “distraction” in a league featuring mostly African-American players.  On the other hand, an African American player like Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the anthem, WAS a distraction.  That’s why a quarterback who played in a Super Bowl can’t even get a tryout to be third on an NFL team’s depth chart.

Maybe you think the owners have a point.  Maybe you think it should be illegal not to sing the national anthem when the flag is paraded around before a game.  Maybe you think people who protest White officers regularly killing unarmed Black youth should go back to where ever they came from.  Fine.

But that still doesn’t excuse the NFL owners attempting to impose their will on their partners, or assuming that teams can treat their players like pets to be disciplined when they don’t behave the way their owner likes. 

Earlier this year Texans owner Bob McNair displayed what he thought of the players when he described them as “inmates” running the prison.  Naturally he apologized, but he still made a statement equating the mostly African-American personnel of the NFL with inmates.  He doesn’t regret the comment, he only regrets being quoted.  The owners aren’t patriots, this isn’t about patriotism, it is about respect.  The owners have no respect for the players who make them very, very rich.  Unfortunately, the players can’t make them any smarter.

Whither The Flash?

Whither the Flash?

Several weeks ago, after a particularly depressing episode of The Flash, someone posted a comment on a media website reviewing the episode and asked, “Does anyone else think that maybe season one of The Flash was just a fluke?” 

That was a succinct summary of my attitude towards The Flash.  The first season was a breath of fresh air in the superhero genre, a show that made watching the comic book genre fun instead of angsty.  But the show lost the fun, and got darker and darker.  By season three the show was positively bleak, with the Flash’s love Iris seemingly doomed to be shish-ka-bobbed by the God of the Speed Force, or some such nonsense.  It made it hard to look forward to season 4.

But miracle of miracle, season 4 started off with the old dose of fun that had made Flash one of the most fun-filled shows on TV.  But at some point, old habits kicked in.  The season’s “Big Bad” (again, copyright Buffy the Vampire Slayer) was The Thinker, a villain who was smarter than all of Team Flash put together (I know they are supposed to be a collection of scientists and geniuses, but some days out thinking them doesn’t seem so tough).  He was mildly amusing at first, but then he started killing people; pretty much everyone, actually.  He killed random guest stars.  He killed interesting multi-episode characters.  Ultimately, he killed a semi-regular, Ralph Dibney, aka The Elongated Man, a member of Team Flash. 

Oh, and he didn’t just kill innocent people, he turned them into metahumans and then stole their powers as he killed them.  Sometimes it got confusing—twice he assumed the body of a young woman, then seemed to intimate that he expected his wife to, um, continue to find hm attractive.  I’m not saying same sex relationships make me uncomfortable; I’m saying that even in the best of marriages, if one party changes gender they can hardly expect the other party to go along unless they’ve given some indication they are on board.  It seemed beyond creepy that he’d expect his wife to become a lesbian just because he killed and took over the body of a young woman.

Also, with all of the various abilities he’s absorbed, his power is virtually godlike.  I can’t even keep track of all of his abilities, sort of like on Heroes when Peter Petrelli started absorbing powers until the producers saw the problem and then implemented a rule that whenever he gained a power, he lost one.  But The Thinker just gobbled up abilities and how he can go anywhere, steal anything he wants, and kill security guards for no reason.  And this is on TOP of being the smartest man alive.  The Flash have made him so powerful, any way that Barry Allen finds to stop him will be a cheat.

How can The Flash fix this problem of seasons getting more and more depressing as the season goes on?  I think for one thing, go back to episodic television.  Season arcs are great if you do them well, but it is easier to come up with 22 good stand alone episodes than one brilliant 20 episode epic.  There are just too many moving pieces, it’s too hard keeping all the balls in the air, choose your metaphor.

Along the same lines, drop the idea that there has to be a big bad each season who must up the ante in every show.  This invariably makes the villain have to do unpleasant things like kill innocent people to keep the stakes constantly being raised.  I don’t mean do what the original Superman did in the 1950’s and make the bad guys a bunch of goons who use words like “dese” and “dem”, but there must be ways for Barry Allen to help people without having to defeat someone wanting to lower all of mankind’s IQ.

Lastly, better use needs to be made of the excellent ensemble cast.  The way they handle, it seems to rotate so that in one episode Killer Frost will have a secret she’s keeping, only to discover she’s better off telling her friends the truth, then next week it’s Vibe, then Iris, then Welles, then Barry, then back to Frost.  You’ve developed a group of interesting characters and hired actors skilled at portraying them; do something unique to each character so that there isn’t a sense of déjà vu (and I hope I never have to hear another Flash character utter the words “I’ll never keeps secrets from the group again.”).

The Flash can be an excellent show, but the past THREE SEASONS it has gotten bogged down tripping over its own feet (another mixed metaphor).  Next season don’t try and swing for the fences, just make contact and trust your actors. 

And be funnier.  And cut back on the senseless murders; they aren’t fun.

The NFL Draft and definitionalism

The NFL draft is almost upon us, and once again I see the participants (and the endless number of analysts who comment on it) are exhibiting angst over the selection process.  Which quarterback will go number one?  Josh Allen?  Baker Mayfield?  Josh Rosen?  Sam Darnold?  The answer to the question of which will be chosen number one has been scrutinized since, well, last year’s draft.

One thing about draft analysis that always bothers me is what I call “definitionalism.”  That means that the number one draft pick will be expected to be better than the other first round picks (and subsequent picks, obviously) because he is the number one pick.  It’s as if picking a player number one somehow imbues him with the qualities expected to be demonstrated by a number one pick.  You expect something to be the definition of that something.

But we shouldn’t expect more of the number one pick than we do of the number two pick, or number four, or even number 10.  First of all, all talent evaluations have a margin of error (just ask the NFL executive who drafted Ryan Leaf).  Number one should be a pretty good NFL player, but so should any of the first-round picks.  If, on a scale from 1-10, Josh Rosen’s prospects are 8.5 and Sam Darnold’s are 8.489, then Rosen should be picked number one; but if each estimate has a plus/minus of 2, the we shouldn’t be surprised if Darnold has a better career.

Projecting future quality is as iffy as forecasting the stock market or Madonna’s love life.  As Yoda said, “Always in motion is the future.”  Robert Griffin III looked like a Hall of Famer—for a season.  Drew Brees’ early career in San Diego looked spotty, but then he was traded to New Orleans and is now a certain HoFer.  You just never know.

There is also the question of fit.  What quarterback will fit with the pieces around him?  Drafting the guy with the strongest arm won’t do your team much good if all your receivers have the dropsies.  Drafting a pocket passer over a mobile QB might be a mistake if you have a porous front line.  It is more important to have an idea of what kind of offense you want and select the best pieces to achieve that idea (which may mean not drafting a quarterback if other pieces are available). 

There is also the problem that a quarterback might be great, but if he’s picked by the Cleveland Browns he won’t be going to a Super Bowl the next season, or in the next five seasons (or ever if the Brown’s management doesn’t get massively smarter).  This is the point of drafting based on the prior season’s outcomes—the best players go to the weakest teams.  But if a team got the number one pick not through tanking but by sheer incompetence, then expecting one player to make a difference is probably asking too much.

Unfortunately, whoever the Cleveland Browns select with their first choice (assuming they don’t trade it or opt to draft a defensive lineman, because they’re the Browns) will have the daunted “number one pick” label attached to him for the rest of his career and after.  Even if the Cleveland Browns win twice as many games next season as last, twice zero is, let me see, zero.  They had the number one pick last year and it didn’t exactly improve them.

My point is, whoever is picked number one, Darnold or Allen or Mayfield or Rosen, the expectations shouldn’t be higher on that player.  They have all proven to be competent NCAA quarterbacks, and their NFL potential is roughly the same.  Don’t get sucked into believing that the one picked number one should be expected to be better than the others.  At this point it is all a crapshoot.

How much will having the number one pick help the Cleveland Browns?  Probably about as much as having last year’s number one picked helped; they selected Miles Garrett of Texas A&M with the first pick in the 2017 draft, and in the 2017-18 season they went 0-16. 

Nothing can help the Cleveland Browns.

Legends of Tomorrow gets renewd

The announcement has been made (to what I hope was no one’s great surprise) that The CW has renewed DC’s Legends of Tomorrow for another season.  If you had asked me around the end of the show’s first season how long it would last, I would have replied, “Is it on next week?”  Season one was a dull plod, with silly hawk-people and a main character who sought to kill the main bad guy because he killed the main character’s wife and child.  Yeah, he also enslaved all mankind and ruled as an iron-fisted despot, but the wife-and-child killing was just over the top. 

But then something miraculous happened: the show got better.  It dropped the gloomy tale of trying to stop immortal despot Vandal Savage (okay, the character was dull, but the name was awesome) and decided to embrace its inner geek.  The show got more imaginative and more daring, eventually featuring Vikings worshipping a Tickle-Me-Elmo knock off, George Lucas changing the fate of humanity by dropping out of film school, Napoleon Bonaparte partaking in Spring Break, and most recently going back in time to 1999 to have guest star John Noble utter some words so the Legends can impersonate a demon whose voice is provided by. . .  John Noble.

The renewal announcement follows a prior announcement that, if the show were to be renewed, it would add actor Matt Ryan as John Constantine as a regular.  This has been generally accepted as a good thing by the comments I’ve seen on the Internet.  Ryan has been on a few episodes as a guest star and has served as an effective comic foil, a new character in the mix, and (thanks to a quick shag in the 1960’s) a reminder that Sarah Lance is in fact bi-sexual and not a lesbian (after flirtations or more with a number of female characters ranging from Queen Guinevere in Camelot to Supergirl’s adopted sister Alex Danvers in the Crisis on Earth X mini-series, I was starting to wonder why she was always described as bi). 

I remain skeptical.  For one thing, I watched the first two episodes of Constantine when it debuted on NBC, and found it less than compelling.  The reason for that is my point two, mainly that I dislike the mixing of science fiction with fantasy.  Or at least what I call “soft fantasy” as opposed to “hard fantasy.”  The latter is demonstrated by Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which dealt with mystic arts and things that defied the realm of science, but did so in an alternative that still had rules that had to be followed.  Vampires can’t enter a home without an invitation; why?  Who cares as long as the rule is applied consistently, I can accept it. 

But on shows like Constantine the rules seem more fluid.  There’s always a way out, a way to stop an all-powerful demon by making a Latin incantation, a way to avert the end of the world by burning incense and making some runes on the floor.  The last two seasons of Buffy occasionally fell into this trap, where a witch could transmute something by a wave of the hand, sort of like Samantha on Bewitched twitching her nose. 

While I have enjoyed Legends this season, I have wearied of the seemingly endless quest to assemble a collection of totems to defeat a demon called Mallus.  Of course this makes no less sense than season two’s quest to assemble a Spear of Destiny, but for some reason that seemed infinitely more reasonable.  Of course when the bad guys assembled the Spear and were able to re-write the universe however they wanted, they chose to make the universe seem an awfully lot like the original.

I am glad there will be another season of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, but I hope adding John Constantine into the mix doesn’t ruin the chemistry of the ensemble.  Of course other characters have been inserted and left without lessening the show’s quality (in some cases improving it), so maybe they know what they are doing.  But the fact is that most shows have an expiration date, a point by which time all plots have been done and all character backstories have been examined.  Maybe four seasons is the time limit for Legends; maybe not. 

When a show has proven so nimble, so adept at evolving into something better, you have to give it the benefit of the doubt.  This show has done something I would have thought was impossible, namely make me actually LIKE Brandon Routh (after that stupid Superman film and the disastrous guest role on Chuck, not even Scott Pilgrim vs. the World could get him out of my doghouse).  So sign me up for another year; heck, I even forced myself to watch seasons 6 and 7 of Buffy.

Talk about a show sticking around past its expiration date.

Whither Whedon?

One of the problems of our celebrity-obsessed culture is that we, the common people, feel some sort of connection to famous people.  We follow them on twitter, visit their Facebook page, and generally think of them as just another buddy, albeit one that never actually sends a personal e-mail.

I try to avoid this delusion, mostly because I am, you know, sane.  But there is one celebrity I feel a connection to, and that’s Joss Whedon.  And I don’t think I’m alone; Whedon’s ability to connect with his fan base was unique among writer-directors.  Of course, the stronger the connection, the stronger the backlash when something severs that connection.

There was a huge fallout when it came to light that Whedon had been unfaithful to his wife with women (unnamed, as far as I know, but then I’ not exactly in the loop) that he had worked with.  As a result the fan site Whedonesque shut down, and his reputation took a hit.  There was a lot of confusion over whether he should be included in the #metoo movement, or questioning his feminist credentials, but there never was any implication that he “Harvey Weinsteined” any women.  To quote the Steve Martin comedy L.A. Story, he had just been “a big dumb male.”

All that aside, I am concerned about his creative output. Of course he had his biggest success with the 2012 release of The Avengers, with a gross of $623.4 million.  In 2013 he released his low budget version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, which may have only grossed $4.3 million but cost next to nothing to make and had an impressive Metacritic score of 78.  A big-budget blockbuster and a critically acclaimed, small budget Shakespearean adaptation; not a bad year.

Since then Whedon’s output hasn’t quite matched those highs.  His follow-up to The Avengers, The Age of Ultron, grossed a mere $459 million and had a middling Metacritic score of 66.  I’ve gone back over Whedon’s oeuvre and frankly I think it is clearly the worst thing he’s ever written/directed.  The script feels rushed, like Marvel wanted to get the sequel out as soon as possible because the franchise might die if the next installment wasn’t in theaters within three years (okay, maybe they had a point). 

Since Ultron, he did some script doctoring on DC’s Justice League (it helped some, but not enough).  He had tried to get a big screen version of Wonder Woman made for years to no avail, which would have helped his feminist street cred, only to see the film get made by a woman director.  He had been linked to the next best thing to a Wonder Woman film, a big-screen version of Batgirl, but reports are that that's off as well.

His imprimatur is still around, as a creator of the TV show Agents of SHIELD (which I stopped watching a couple of years ago) and other Marvel-centric entertainments.  But the director of two of the 13 biggest grossing films of all time (okay, Black Panther will bump Age of Ultron Ultron down to 14 next week) hasn’t directed anything since Ultron, three years ago.

Where does Whedon go?  Back to television?  Frankly that seems to be a medium more suited to his skills at witty dialog, plot twists and character development.  Or would that be seen as slumming after directing two films that together grossed over a billion dollars? Given we now live in the era of beloved TV show reboots, would a “reimagining” of Firefly be considered blasphemy?

Sometimes creative types can find freedom to be intimidating.  It’s easier to take risks when you know you have to succeed or be jobless.  Once you have the freedom to do whatever you want, you might suddenly find you don’t know what you want (after The Avengers huge opening weekend Whedon sent out a message that finally he’d be able to do that reboot of Air Bud the world had been waiting for).

Between 1939 and 1944 Preston Sturges produced six of the most brilliant comedies ever filmed (The Great McGinty won an Oscar for best screenplay; four of the five others made the AFI list of top 100 comedies).  When he was finally given the freedom by the studio to make his lifelong dream, he made a biopic about the invention of anesthesia called The Great Moment.  His career never recovered. 

I hope Joss Whedon can find his next project and have better success recovering from his career setbacks of the past few years.

It is impossible for the NCAA NOT to be corrupt

In the realm of “news that is not news” we have this shocking revelation—some college basketball players may be receiving money!  This is a shocking discovery to the coaches (who make millions of dollars) and the athletic directors (ditto) of the major college powerhouses.  How dare the pristine world of college basketball be sullied by filthy lucre!  “What about the resplendent joys of pure amateurism?” ask the coaches from their summer homes in Gstaad or Corsica. 

It’s an iron law of economics—money abhors a vacuum.  College basketball generates billions of dollars of revenue for major programs, not to mention the money wagered on March Madness brackets.  The idea that coaches, or boosters, or agents would not divert a slim trickle of that amount to the players responsible for a program’s success is Pollyannaish in the extreme.  Add in the fact that many of the top recruits are from less-than-wealthy homes, have little interest in academe, and have visions of million dollar contracts and shoe endorsement deals dancing in their heads, and the idea that such players will happy exile themselves to playing for free for a year becomes as fanciful as the Easter Bunny.

Those who support the “one and done” policy that the NCAA and the NBA have developed argue that there is an inherent benefit of exposing young men to higher education.  They argue that these young men are not unpaid, but instead paid in exposure to the ideas and concepts they learn about in the classes they take while attending college.

As Dorothy Parker once said, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make hi8m drink/You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.”  I’d find this line of reasoning more credible if I could also remember a large number of news conferences where star athletes announced that they were forgoing the NBA draft to complete their BA degree.  If anyone remembers a single news conference like that, let me know because I can’t think of one.  If a young athlete wants to use his basketball skills to leverage admission to a prestige college, great; but these student-athletes aren’t going to be those who will be “one and done” in the first place.

Another argument for the one and done policy is that 18 year old boys coming out of high school aren’t mature enough, aren’t physically developed enough, to compete in the NBA against 25 year old men.  That would be a reasonable line of argument if it were true that no high school graduates had ever succeeded entering the NBA directly from high school.  And none have.

Except for Lebron James.  And Kobe Bryant.  And Kevin Garnett.  And Moses Malone.  And . . . oh heck, here is Wikipedia's list of high school draftees.  It is really hard to argue that high school players can’t succeed in the NBA when you have Lebron James as the literal poster boy for direct from high school eligibility.

Another problem with the one-and-done system is the fact that the NCAA prohibits student-athletes from having agents.  On the one hand, agents might invariably tell students to skip playing for free at school and start earning money, for both themselves and the agent, in the NBA.  But agents who want to maximize their income might advise players who are truly unprepared for the NBA to stay in school in order to develop their game, in effect getting free career development advice from someone like Coach K at Duke or Tom Izzo at Michigan State.  This might be an objective source of advice, unlike family members whose opinion is uninformed and who have a higher incentive to get the kid into the NBA (and making money) as soon as possible.

I previously suggested two reforms for college football.  One, if you aren’t going to pay students for playing, at least pay them for practicing.  Most student-athletes are unable to earn money at part-time jobs on campus because of the time commitment for practice, so treat their practice time as the equivalent of a part-time job that would give them some money for buying pizzas or making trips home during breaks.  Second, student athletes have complete control over their names and images, and any use of a player’s name or image for profit needs to reimburse that player.  Perhaps the money could be put in a trust until the player leaves college, but the NCAA can’t sell the rights to a player’s image without the permission of that player, and agreeing to play for the team is not consent.

I don’t know how these would apply to basketball players.  Football players are trapped in college for three years, while one and dones only have to pretend to be a student for one semester or two quarters (the players who know they are headed for the draft can blow off their Spring classes and just lie around dreaming of their NBA contracts).  I don’t think the money from a part-time job or selling the rights to a player’s name would give them enough money to dis-incentivize accepting $100,000 under the table (allegedly). 

The biggest irony in all this is the call by people such as Lebron James for the NBA to stop using the NCAA as a minor league and to pay players more for playing in the “G League.”  The irony is that it is called the “G League” because Gatorade bought the naming rights to what used to be the Developmental League (D League).  Once again, someone else (the NBA) is making money off the backs of unpaid or underpaid players.

College is a great place for people who want to be there.  For a young athlete who is forced to spend one year playing for free instead of making millions of dollars, it is not a great place to be; saying he is getting paid with an education is meaningless when he’ll be leaving after one year.  Money being funneled to players under the table cannot be stopped so long as there is so much money on the table and the people responsible for that money are forced to play for free.  The NCAA cannot stop being a corrupt system so long as there are billions of dollars floating around and players who want some of that money.

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.