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PITTSBURGH — When the Marvel superhero movie “Black Panther” opens this Friday, there will be an African drum ensemble greeting patrons as they enter the SouthSide Works Cinema theater and a post-screening Afro-futurism-themed party at the Ace Hotel. Around the country, it has sparked lectures and academic panel discussions sponsored by universities and churches, and even the AARP is getting in on the “Black Panther” action by scheduling screenings in major cities.
Far and wide, African-Americans are treating “Black Panther” as both holiday and policy proposal, setting it up to affect Hollywood and African-American culture in a way that goes beyond box-office returns.
This will be the first standalone movie for the Black Panther character in the Marvel cinematic universe, which includes “Iron Man,” “Thor,” “Spiderman” and dozens of other superheroes from the nearly 80-year-old comics powerhouse.
What’s different about “Black Panther” in one respect, however, is it will feature an almost entirely African-American cast of characters — including Lupita Nyong’o (“12 Years a Slave”), Daniel Kaluuya (“Get Out”), Michael B. Jordan (“Creed”), Forest Whitaker (“Rogue One”), and Angela Bassett (“Chi-Raq”). It’s directed by Ryan Coogler, the young African-American director whose first two films, “Fruitvale Station” and “Creed,” won numerous awards from film associations and festivals across the globe.
That starpower helps explain why expectations are so high for “Black Panther” both as a movie and as a political statement.
“In the midst of a regressive cultural and political moment fueled in part by the white-nativist movement, the very existence of Black Panther feels like resistance,” Jamil Smith wrote in TIME magazine.
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A petition on Change.org currently demands that Marvel and Disney contribute 25 percent of the movie’s profits to black communities to fund programs focused on science, technology, engineering and math, for instance.
“As black communities across the United States continue to grapple with issues such as gentrification, police brutality, and substandard living conditions, we cannot continue to recklessly support these conglomerates, allowing them to profit off of us without demanding something more than just their products in return,” the petition states. “Income inequality is real, and the continued decline of black wealth is something that need not only be addressed, but solved.”
This is not the first time that a black movie has been expected to serve the needs of black communities beyond its entertainment value. Nearly 50 years ago, civil rights groups, led by activists such as Jesse Jackson and Roy Innis, the director of the Congress of Racial Equality, were also demanding that the film industry contribute proceeds from its movies to black-owned banks and institutions, and threatened boycotts if it didn’t.
The impetus was somewhat different back then: Civil rights advocates filed these claims against Hollywood because they were upset with the quality of black films offered to the public. This was when the films “Shaft” (1971) and “Superfly” (1972), directed by Gordon Parks and his son Gordon Parks Jr., respectively, had just been released, both portraying arguably the first black “superheroes” to grace the silver screen.
“Shaft” is about a black detective, fancied as a black Derek Flint and Errol Flynn wrapped in one, who takes on the Italian mafia in Harlem. “Superfly” is about a drug dealer looking for one last, big cocaine offload so that he can ride off into retirement in a fancy Cadillac. Both movies were criticized for peddling stereotypes of black men as vice lords and sexual predators in an film era permeated by toxic masculinity, but these films broke ground in terms of black representation.
“Hollywood has been so unkind to us throughout history that until this era, when we went to the movies, when you saw a black character you started to cringe because you knew [he was going to die],” says Stanley Nelson, the African-American filmmaker who recently created a PBS documentary on The Black Panther Party and has an upcoming documentary on historically black colleges and universities.
With “Shaft” and “Superfly,” Nelson added, “You had a black hero [who] was going to win. Shaft was not going to get shot in the first reel. He was going to succeed, and we were not used to seeing that. So what Shaft did was made it so we didn’t have to cringe.”
“Shaft” brought in $12 million in its first year, while costing only a little over $1 million to create. “Superfly” was shot on a budget of less than $500,000, and pulled in $20 million at the box office in its first year.