Smells Like ‘10s Spirit: ‘Black Panther’ and the Shattered Myth of the Unbankable Black Film

Smells Like ’10s Spirit” takes a look at the decade in movies through the lens of success stories only made possible by unique trends that emerged. This series explores ten films – one from each year of the 2010s – and a single social, economic or cultural factor that can explain why it made an impact or lingers in the collective memory. Each piece examines a single film that tells the larger story of the tectonic forces reshaping the entertainment landscape as we know it. In this edition: Black Panther, written and directed by Ryan Coogler.

“Relating to characters onscreen is necessary not merely for us to feel seen and understood,” opined journalist Jamil Smith upon the release of Black Panther, “but also for others who need to see and understand us.” If cinema is, as Roger Ebert notoriously coined it, a machine generating empathy, it’s important to consider with whom we’re most often invited to empathize. For the majority of the medium’s history, film has guided its audience to identify primarily with characters similar to the creators behind the work: white people (and, more specifically, financially stable cisgender straight men).

The triumph of 2018’s Black Panther in everything from leading the domestic box office to landing an Oscar nomination for Best Picture – plus winning three below-the-line trophies – represents a hopeful sign that the film industry will begin to diversify who can make and serve as the subject of major tentpole features. (Perhaps it’s also a somewhat defiant sign given the change in presidential leadership between the film’s greenlight and release.) A disconnect between who occupies seats at movie theaters  and who graces those screens — you know, when that was still a thing — has existed for far too long. Ameliorating this should be a humanistic rather than an economic decision. However, it cannot hurt that the film’s success, along with other non-white driven hits like Crazy Rich Asians, made 2018 a rare occasion in which North America was the primary driver of revenue growth in the industry. Diversifying on-screen representation is more than a moral or political victory; it may also be a survival strategy for a business in tumult.

Criticism of the industry’s overwhelming homogeneity did not begin in the 2010s, but it certainly reached a fever pitch as study after study quantified the disproportionate erasure of minorities from the silver screen. The situation reached its nadir around the middle of the decade after Academy Awards voters failed to nominate a single performer of color in two consecutive years, 2015 and 2016. An overwhelming public outcry for change calcified in the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, coined by April Reign, and pushed forward an important question that would come to define the final years of the ‘10s: who gets to say what stories are important at every stage of the filmmaking process?

From the studio greenlight to the marketing plan, from the box office reception to the awards conversation, studios have baked-in assumptions of what a wide group of audiences can find relevant or sympathetic. Reign and countless others who raised their voices in righteous indignation over the system’s erasure of non-white voices exposed an uncomfortable unspoken truth: the industry treated identification like a one-way street. They saw no issue with forcing women, people of color and other minority groups to see themselves reflected in white male protagonists. For much of the art form’s history, they had no other choice. But every time it came time to ask the white men in the theater to see themselves in characters of a different race or gender, executives found a reason to fret.

The history of race on- and off-screen has far too long a history to recount even in a single article. I’ll have to elide a history from 1898’s long-lost Something Good Negro Kiss to 1915’s Klan-reigniting The Birth of a Nation, from Oscar Micheaux to Charles Burnett to Julie Dash, as well as from Hattie McDaniel to Sidney Poitier. If any of these don’t ring a bell, I encourage you to research them, for they are an integral part of cinema’s history that often faces erasure. (Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film: An Odyssey, available to stream on Hulu, provides an essential corrective to the heavily whitewashed industry narrative most of us know.)

The rise of Eddie Murphy as a Hollywood power player makes for the most immediate starting point for our current studio filmmaking environment. While his box office-topping reign as the star of Beverly Hills Cop and more provided the industry reason to believe it had overcome a large amount of racism, Murphy’s success in the 1980s also came with a price. According to Racquel J. Gates’ essential tome Double Negative, his critics argued Murphy’s hit films “reassert[ed] a kind of essentialized Blackness that locks Black performers into limited categories and denies the variety and fluidity of cultural Blackness itself.” As America moved in fits and starts towards fulfilling the notions of equality promised by the Civil Rights era, the films that seemed to herald progress were in effect laying the seeds of re-segregation by so strongly associating Black struggle with cultural authenticity.

The 1990s solidified this stratification. On the one hand, there were more Black voices both in front of and behind the camera; The Guardian recently declared it “a golden age” for Black cinema. Thanks to growing interest in hip-hop and rap – fueled in part by white audiences, the ones to whom marketers predominately catered – more opportunities were available to Black filmmakers. (Let this sink in: the first film directed by a Black woman received nationwide distribution in just 1991.) But this renaissance had the misfortune of coinciding with the larger corporate takeover of cinema, which also began to subsume the independent scene as well. These economic arrangements led to the reestablishment of what author Maryann Erigha declared “the Jim Crow logic” of the box office. “Blackness is devalued and linked to cultural and economic inferiority,” Erigha wrote, “and whiteness is valued and linked to cultural and economic superiority.”

If that sounds extreme, consider how the aforementioned disparity between whose stories the industry deems “universal” and whose it regards as “niche” determines the delineations of the art form. Black or multi-racial stories get labeled “urban films,” receive smaller budgets and are marketed to targeted racial demographics rather than to a race-neutral general audience. “What transpires is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Erigha described. “Raced marketing plans reinforce the perception that Black movies are unbankable to non-Black audiences.”

Often, this mentality evinces itself in the soft bigotry of low expectations. Time and again, Black-fronted or Black-directed films receive media coverage of boffo box office returns framed through the lens of “surprise hit” or “surpassed expectations.” Be it The Best Man Holiday or Straight Outta Compton, the industry perpetuates the insidious, implicit bias that stories about or involving people of color only resonate within those communities. “It’s almost like there’s an asterisk on it,” observed the president of Lionsgate’s CodeBlack Films, Jeff Clanagan, in 2017. “They chalk it off as an anomaly.” In the absence of recognition for cross-quadrant potential, a two-tiered system of recognition for Black-led films perpetuates itself.

But there are ways in which this hegemony asserts itself more forcefully in the form of outright racial bias. As recently as the mid-2000s, the casting of the rom-com Hitch arose directly from racialized pressures. Leading man Will Smith confirmed that Sony selected his on-screen romantic interest, Cuban-American actress Eva Mendes, in an effort to satisfy what they assumed both domestic and worldwide audiences would find acceptable. “There’s sort of an accepted myth that if you have two Black actors, a male and a female, in the lead of a romantic comedy, that people around the world don’t want to see it,” Smith confessed on the film’s press tour in 2005, “So the idea of a Black actor and a white actress comes up — that’ll work around the world, but it’s a problem in the U.S.”

Worldwide audiences have long served as a cop-out for the industry to avoid owning up to the shameful racial biases they are too scared to confront and disrupt injustice. “I always call international the new South,” then-BET president Reginald Hudlin proclaimed in 2007. “In the old days, they told you Black films don’t travel down South. Now they say it’s not going to travel overseas.” A notable exception to this trend was, ironically enough, “Worldwide” Will Smith. But in order to prove himself “bankable” to overseas audiences, Smith foot the bill himself to travel around the world promoting his films, per Octavia Spencer. “They have to start investing and taking Black actresses and actors across the world just like they do with unknown white actors,” she said.

So, you’ve made it this far with scarcely a mention of the film this article actually centers around. (Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.) But it’s important to acknowledge the magnitude and scale of the challenges Black Panther faced when Marvel brought it to market in 2018. After all, a USC study of films released four years prior found that 22% of films did not grant any speaking roles to Black characters. Yet, in spite of this erasure, Black Americans continued flocking to the movies. In terms of per capita attendance by ethnicity, Black audiences were equal to or surpassing white ones every year from 2009 to 2013 according to MPAA data (and both lagged well behind Hispanic audiences). “We consume what the mainstream consumes, as African-Americans,” observed USC business professor Marlene Towns, “but we also consume things that are particular to us as a segment.” This was a market inefficiency Disney and Marvel could rush in and solve.

There’s a cynical read of why a movie like Black Panther exists – a Thanos-like quest for Infinity Stones where different audience segments are the all-powerful gems. Marvel spent much of the 2010s diversifying its comic book pages, introducing a Black Captain America, female Thor and Muslim teenager Ms. Marvel. And a look at larger macroeconomic forces makes a compelling case that Disney knew it was making a product to meet the market. Steady income growth in the new millennium for African-American families produced an increase in Black buying power, per a 2016 Nielsen study, increasing 21% from just 2010 to 2015. The primary way they spent their leisure time? Watching TV and movies. Black millennials in particular over-indexed the total market on viewing by 20%. Combine that with 62% of that cohort saying that they feel “really good” when seeing celebrities in the media who share their ethnic background, and the stage was set for Black Panther to enter.

Of course, anything the Marvel Industrial Complex touches these days is guaranteed to generate nine-figure box office returns. But former Disney CEO Bob Iger, Kevin Feige and the other corporate powers that be deserve credit for committing to representation beyond tokenism. Black Panther does not rest on the laurels of its historic status for a minute, instead investing deeply in a rich exploration of the power and potential inherent in Blackness. While the overall plot structure still conforms to the contours of comic book cinema, writer/director Ryan Coogler wrestles profoundly with questions of Black identity apart from its relationship to whiteness. It’s a stark contrast to the sanitized corporate feminism that predominates the genre’s overtures to female audiences, and a vision that more blockbuster filmmakers should heed.

This respect and acknowledgement of Black excellence begins in the visual styling of the film, rooted deeply in the Afrofuturist style expressed in the comic books. This aesthetic arose as a rejoinder to visions of the future and other far-flung realms that did not imagine Black people as part of humanity’s next frontier. Every frame of Black Panther makes an impassioned defense against colonialist attitudes, neo or otherwise, and vibrantly envisions a world that was previously relegated to the realm of imagination. “What would Africans have done given reign over their own culture, without having been colonized?” pondered production designer Hannah Beachler, who won an Oscar for her work on the film. “How would their cultures have mixed together?”

In Black Panther‘s Wakanda, a technological Eden, we see a vision of Africa world apart from the patronizing “noble savage” myth perpetuated by its colonizers. There are hardly any white people in the film at all, and the ones that do certainly are not presented as saviors. In fact, Martin Freeman’s Everett K. Ross requires assistance from Letitia Wright’s wise-cracking Suri to fly a plane for rescue purposes in the film’s climax. Coogler’s film is not anti-white, nor is it really anti-anything. Black Panther draws strength from the way it presents Black men and women as people in full: natural, normal and powerful. When it feels radical, that only speaks to just how long we’ve gone without this basic humanist treatment for Black people on screen.

Coogler also knows that showing is better than telling, especially with such a massive budget for effects, so Black Panther avoids the trappings of a respectability lecture or soapbox moralizing. Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challah, the film’s titular hero, evinces the kind of leadership through listening and compassion. He surrounds himself with the counsel of women as well as other tribes, and the film does not present him as weak for it. While his reign faces a major challenge in Michael B. Jordan’s radical anti-imperialist Killmonger, the film clearly favors his brand of non-toxic masculinity.

Black Panther‘s vision connected and made the kind of splash that extended far beyond the film and entertainment realm. Before it even hit theaters, the #BlackPantherChallenge sprung up online to provide Black youth a chance to see themselves represented on screen. Within days, Frederick Joseph’s original GoFundMe quadrupled its original goal of $10,000 and spawned a movement replicated by A Wrinkle in Time and Captain Marvel to provide avenues for on-screen affirmation. A TIME magazine cover story accurately picked up on the tremors of the coming cultural earthquake set off by Coogler’s film. “Black Panther is like an exclamation point at the end of a sentence,” mused The Daily Beast, “a summation of all this Black entertainment excellence we’ve been witnessing for years that the world is finally getting hip to.”

But, as Paul Schrader (via Ethan Hawke) so wisely said, a good movie begins as you’re walking out of the theater. (Or maybe turning off the TV in the COVID-19 era.) #KillmongerWasRight began trending on Twitter as viewers grappled deeply with the film’s ideas around imperialism, solidarity and pan-African responsibility. I’ve had many an argument with a dear friend of mine who writes off the film’s significance given its Marvel packaging, and my response to him is that it would take Ryan Coogler an entire career of making movies like his 2013 debut Fruitvale Station to generate the volume of dialogue around these pressing issues. While there were certainly MCU Easter Eggs for online fanboys to discuss, Black Panther re-routed the bulk of the energy around a Marvel film toward deliberation on racial representation and justice. That’s no small feat.

The film opened to a whopping $202 million, of which 37% of ticket buyers were Black – more than double their traditional attendance for comic book films. It went on to gross a staggering $700 million domestically, enough to lead all 2018 releases – including Marvel’s own hotly anticipated Avengers: Infinity War. In a remarkable tribute to the film’s staying power, Black Panther remained in the weekend top 10 for 13 weeks – an increasing rarity in an era of tentpoles that flame out quickly after big openings. Disney and Marvel’s investment in a film that took the first step toward correcting a long history of racial erasure paid off as audiences who saw themselves represented in Black Panther, along with many others who did not, both visited and returned to Wakanda.

A little more than two years removed from the film’s release still makes for too small a window to judge whether the industry learned the proper lessons from Black Panther. Especially as movies continue to cede ground in the cultural conversation to television and streaming, studios and production companies will see the diversification of storytelling as the structural imperative that it is. “Storylines with a strong Black character or identity are crossing cultural boundaries to grab diverse audiences and start conversations,” observed Andrew McCaskill, Nielsen’s SVP for Communications and Multicultural Marketing, of the small screen’s embrace of shows centered around non-white characters. There’s no reason to believe it cannot apply to cinema.

Hopefully, some smart studio executive looked at the same moviegoer demographic data I did and sees the tremendous opening for a superhero film fronted by an audience. 24% of all frequent moviegoers are Hispanic, higher than their share of the American population, and yet the highest grossing films from 2007-2018 only granted 4.5% of their speaking parts to Latino actors. (Unsurprisingly, these roles skewed heavily towards criminal and law-breaking characters.) There’s a sleeping giant here waiting to be woken, provided they don’t just cast Scarlett Johansson as the lead and call it a day.

But, in the meantime, we can celebrate and recognize the impact Black Panther had on a generation of Black youth who now see their lives validated on screen. The New York Times talked to some of the students who saw the film in Brooklyn thanks to the #BlackPantherChallenge. As 12-year-olds are liable to do, some described their reaction to Black Panther in less than serious terms. “I want to go jump over a car and make a tribe” and “the movie makes me want to come back from the dead and take out people with my claws,” two students offered. But consider the response of Jaheim Hedge, who stated that “to see a Black person control a whole country and creating all this technology really made me feel I can do more with my brain” upon seeing the film.

There’s something more important than the money that’s possible to gross from a greater share of the population seeing themselves represented on screen. Beyond identification, they might be moved to action – a reminder of the cinema’s unique capability to affect reality through effective use of the dream factory.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, Little White Lies and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.

Where to stream Black Panther