The Hollywood Reporter – 28.02.2018

The Business

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 82 FEBRUARY 28, 2018

Film

Compared to the average superhero audience, Black Panther

and Wonder Woman brought in newly energized crowds

Just a month ago, the film was Modern Heroes Smash Demo Barriers
tracking to open at $100 mil-
lion: How do you account for a
$140 million underestimation?
Were those 10 million people
hiding somewhere? (No.) That’s
simply a prognostication machine
that wasn’t paying attention to
the social media response to
those first trailers back in June
or reading the not-that-hard-
to-read tea leaves of GoFundMe
campaigns to take kids by the
classroom to see Black Panther.
There’s been a long-held
belief in Hollywood that black
films don’t play overseas, yet
Black Panther was at $500 mil-
lion worldwide as of Feb. 22. If
you string enough anomalies
together, they’re not anomalies
anymore. They paint a picture ...
and not the kind of picture you
have to stare at for hours until
the pirate ship appears.
The next few weeks will find
Hollywood executives and agents,
networks and studios trying to
wrap their minds around what
they were previously happy to dis-
miss as anomalies but have now
presented themselves as a New
World Order. It will be tempting
to look at the past year at the box
office and decide that Narrow is
the New Broad. That the old four-
quadrant model is just that, old.
That bland spectacle is no longer
enough. That the way forward is to
be culturally specific.
But it’s not like specificity is
some new concept. Comedy has
taught us that lesson for decades.
Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy,
George Lopez, Ellen DeGeneres,
Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock
have all enjoyed massive cross-
over success by embracing their

specificity rather than avoiding it.

A joke devoid of detail ain’t gonna

make no one laugh.

And genre storytelling has lived

and died by the tactile realness

of its world-building. If Westeros

didn’t feel like an actual place,

with various rivalries, traditions,

legends and politics, then Game of

Thrones would’ve died the unher-

alded death of so many uninspired

sci-fi/fantasy dramas. Detail is

what makes it breathe. (And if you

don’t have detail, you’d better have

nostalgia. Just ask Jurassic World.)

The idea of filmmakers of a spe-

cific ethnicity getting to tell their

tales isn’t entirely revolutionary:

Try to imagine The Godfather or

Goodfellas from directors without

the intimate knowledge of Italian

family dynamics that Francis

Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese

brought to bear. Or Schindler’s List

in the hands of a filmmaker who

didn’t feel the tonnage of history

the way Steven Spielberg did.

No, the reason we’re in the

midst of a halcyon age of repre-

sentational storytelling that’s

resonating on a historic scale is

that a far more diverse pool

of storytellers — black filmmak-

ers, female filmmakers, Asian

filmmakers — are getting empow-

ered to tell their stories their way

with all the resources usually

reserved for white, male creatives.

Black Panther isn’t just the story

of a handsome prince taking the

throne of a fictional, advanced

African nation, it’s also the story

of a filmmaker reckoning with

the disconnect that lives in the

hyphen between “African” and

“American.” It’s about a man

who grew up around women of

strength and grace and power

who didn’t think twice about pop-

ulating both his art and his set

with those same kinds of women.

It’s about a kid from Oakland

dreaming dreams that the world

told him he couldn’t.

Similarly, Thor: Ragnarok

would never have been both a

balls-out buddy comedy with

a perfectly timed anus joke and

a trenchant examination of the

paved-over sins of colonial expan-

sion without the half-Maori

New Zealander Taika Waititi at

the helm. And we have proof

positive of how Jenkins’ center-

ing of Diana in Won d er Wom an

is different from Zack Snyder’s

treatment of the same character

in Justice League: More open-

ness, innocence and resolve ...

fewer gratuitous shots of Gal

Gadot’s ass.

And there’s no one who could’ve

conceived of Get Out but Peele, who

spent years exploring the ways

race and genre collide on TV’s

Key & Peele, is a student of horror

and has definitely found himself

navigating the frothy waters of

meeting a white girlfriend’s par-

ents for the first time.

The way forward isn’t simply

to decide to greenlight stories

about diverse people. It’s to cul-

tivate a generation of writers,

directors and producers who see

the world through their own

unique lens and then bring that

perspective to bear. If Marvel

didn’t have someone like Nate

Moore in its producer ranks,

someone who knew who T’Challa

was and what he could mean,

you’d never get a Black Panther. If

Pixar didn’t elevate story artist

Adrian Molina to co-director and

co-writer, Coco might’ve seemed

more like a Day of the Dead

theme park ride than a haunting,

heartbreaking exaltation of Dia de

los Muertos.

What audiences are responding

to, in every movie that’s popped

in the past year, is a sense of truth.

Just as we can tell, somehow,

when CG is spack led on a little too

heavily, we can sense when some-

thing feels inauthentic. We can tell

the difference between 12 Years

a Slave and Amistad, between The

Joy Luck Club and The Last Samurai,

between Selma and Mississippi

Burning. One of them feels true

— and truth, ultimately, is what

makes something universal.

Thor: Ragnarok (Disney, Nov. 3)

Source: comScore/PostTrak, opening weekends

60% Male

40% Female

23%

Hispanic African-16%

American

8%

Asian

3%

Other

50%

Caucasian

Wonder Woman (Warner Bros., June 2)

Black Panther (Disney, Feb. 16)

23%

Hispanic African-15%

American

8%

Asian

5%

Other

49%

Caucasian

52% Female

56% Male

44% Female

48% Male

35%

Caucasian 18%

Hispanic

5%

Asian

5%

Other

37%

African-

American