I think Dorkly gets how Black Panther will change the average blockbuster but I’m hoping that this parody isn’t proven to be the real life version of how things will go in the future. Obviously it won’t but one can’t ever be too sure with Hollywood. After all this is the same industry that showed as Transformer peeing on a guy’s head after all. But with the MCU churning out mega-hits again and again, with a few noted films that were less than stellar, it seems safe to say that we’ll be seeing a big change in the blockbuster as time goes on. Of course there is one thing that everyone keeps forgetting. The Black Panther wasn’t the first black Marvel hero to make it to the big screen.
Yes, he’s definitely more successful than Blade was and has a chance to become even bigger if the studio continues to play him in the right manner, but as far as being the first, Blade was there a long time before the Black Panther ever suited up, and a lot of people have seemed eager to forget about this. They were eager to forget about Eric Bana’s version of the Hulk too, but that one seems kind of understandable. I mean it was really, REALLY bad.
But if the Black Panther is bound to change the blockbuster in any way it’s going to be by making an African-American, and an African superhero no less, into a crowning star that has every advantage that his white counterparts have and is seen as a strong and intelligent man that can make a difference. I hate to say that anything in this has anything to do with the racial landscape that’s been highly unstable for the last several years but it kind of does. People want diversity in their movies and at this point they’ve seen a lot of white superheroes that have gone gallivanting into the limelight while those like the Falcon and Rhodey are treated like secondary characters that only have value when they’re really needed. But then wait, what about Nick Fury? He’s not a character that gets buried all that easily, especially considering who plays him.
I agree that Black Panther will change the blockbuster in its own way, but thinking that it might change it in a way that will be groundbreaking is kind of insulting since it tends to insinuate that all the films that have come through to date that have featured strong black men were just precursors to this movie. It’s a big step forward, yes, but it’s not the ONLY time that this kind of thing happened. Black men and women have been starring blockbuster films for a while and making a huge difference in how they’re represented in movies, and to think that is something new is kind of dismissive of those moments. It’s another chapter for certain, and one that’s just as important, but don’t ever think it’s the first chapter, otherwise you’ve missed a lot of that particular story already.
Comic via Dorkly
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