The Enduring Impact of Marvel’s Black Panther

To help promote the film, there was also an official soundtrack executive produced by Kendrick Lamar, featuring himself and other black artists on several rap songs. Speaking of rap, there were merchandise collaborations between Marvel and legendary rap group Wu-Tang Clan for Black Panther. The marketing of the film was so aggressive that it seemed to mirror that of Tim Burton’s Batman back in 1989.

Once Black Panther finally hit theaters on February 16, 2018, it became a must-see movie through word of mouth alone. Social media was filled with pictures of fans attending screenings wearing African garb, dashikis, and the aforementioned Wu-Tang merch. Many screenings were sold out for weeks. I wasn’t even able to see it until 3 weeks after it came out and when I did, I had to do so by myself because tickets were still hard to find. When I arrived for the showing of the film, the theater was still packed and buzzing with excitement. This vibe stretched across the globe, as fans in Africa were also excited to see the film. They had very emotional reactions, with many saying that it left them in tears. 

Some also praised Killmonger’s character arc of an African-American returning to his homeland of Africa. Killmonger was left in America by his uncle, T’Challa’s father, and forced to grow up in Oakland, California surrounded by poverty, drug abuse, and violence. Meanwhile, his cousin T’Challa lived in Wakanda, a place that could be considered heaven on earth for black people. This dichotomy created tension between the two cousins as they met face to face for the first time and their ideologies clashed. Killmonger had a radical view of how to help black people worldwide using Wakanda’s resources, while T’Challa wanted to keep those resources only for Wakanda. A lot of people, including myself, understood Killmonger’s anger because we’ve felt it before, and this made him one of the MCU’s best villains.

After all the hype and excitement, Black Panther was indeed worth the wait, and this was reflected at the box office. The film opened on Presidents Day weekend to a record-breaking $235 million. It is currently the 14th highest-grossing movie of all time with a box office gross of $1.334 billion, but Black Panther also had a huge impact on the film industry itself.

Its success was too much for the Oscars to ignore, and it became the first MCU film to become nominated for and win awards at the show. Even though it didn’t win Best Picture, the fact that it stood next to films such as BlacKkKlansman and A Star is Born helped legitimize Marvel Studios and their films, as well as other superhero movies. But perhaps the biggest impact of the film was that it made many people rethink how they tackled diversity.

After the movie was released, people of different ethnicities began asking “Where’s our Black Panther?” The most famous example of this was probably Gina Rodriguez’s now-deleted tweet: “Marvel and DC are killing it in inclusion and women but where are the Latinos?! Asking for a friend…” Although Rodriguez has a very problematic history when it comes to commenting on race, it did show that even in Hollywood people were increasingly pushing to explore stories featuring racial minorities.