The Hollywood Reporter – 28.02.2018

The Business

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 80 FEBRUARY 28, 2018

CLAY ENOS/WARNER BROS.

Film

Illustrations by Ryan Garcia

F

or as much as Hollywood

loves a repeatable phenom-

enon, it is comforted by the

anomaly, the unsolvable puzzle

that deposits hundreds of millions

in the bank while cutting against

the grain of received wisdom and

can’t possibly be replicated. The

anomaly provides cover for execu-

tives to do what they’ve always

done, to stay greenlight-compla-

cent, to never have to chase the

unicorn because the unicorn can

never be caught.

When Get Out was released

nearly a year ago and went on to

The Lesson of Black Panther:

Narrow Is the New Broad

After a string of seemingly anomalous box-office hits (Get Out, Girls Trip and

now Marvel’s latest), maybe, just maybe, a unicorn isn’t a unicorn anymore

make $255 million worldwide on

a reported $4.5 million budget,

it was viewed in many quarters —

too many quarters — as a fluke.

Jordan Peele’s film landed just

after Donald Trump, who ran a

divide-and-conquer presidential

campaign, was sworn into office

and spoke to the felt realities of a

Black America confronting an

ineffable slide into overt hostility.

But, clearly, there was no pattern

to be mimicked there. No real les-

son to learn. Anomaly.

Then Won d er Wom an landed

in June — the first major studio

film about a comic book super-

heroine to be helmed by a female

director, Patty Jenkins. And it

touched off a movement: Women,

long sidelined in the superhero

arms race, flexed their muscles

and flocked to the Warner Bros.

release over and over and over

again, bringing friends, sisters

and mothers to see themselves

centered in the action in ways

they’d never seen before. They

pumped fists and shed tears at

the triumphant “No Man’s Land”

sequence, which Warners brass

reportedly didn’t understand and

asked Jenkins to cut, until she

dug in her heels. “It’s the most

important scene,” the direc-

tor said. “It’s also the scene that

made the least sense to other

people going in.” Domestically,

Won d er Woman has outgrossed

every other DC Extended Universe

film, and at $821.8 million glob-

ally, it fell just $50 million shy

of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of

Justice — and that had Batman

and Superman. Anomaly.

Girls Trip, a raunchy $19 million

comedy starring Jada Pinkett

Smith, Queen Latifah, Regina Hall

and Tiffany Haddish, dropped a

month later and made $140 mil-

lion worldwide while surrounded

by testosterone-heavy franchise

entries. (It came a month after

Rough Night, a raunchy, $20 mil-

lion comedy starring Scarlett

Johansson, Kate McKinnon, Zoe

Kravitz and Ilana Glazer, whiffed

at the box office with $47.3 mil-

lion globally — and that’s with an

Avenger in the cast.) Anomaly.

And now there’s Black Panther —

the Ryan Coogler-directed Marvel

film with an overwhelmingly black

cast and an incredibly diverse

crew — which has smashed every

expectation in its first two week-

ends. There’s a temptation to

say that its $242.1 million four-day

opening “overperformed,” but that

word just reveals the failure of

the establishment to understand

the product and its audience.

Jenkins

(left) with

star Gal

Gadot on

the set

of Wonder

Woman.

ANALYSIS | MARC BERNARDIN

Marc Bernardin is a television

writer and former THR editor who

co-hosts the Fatman on Batman

podcast with Kevin Smith.