If a movie makes $242 million on opening week and nobody talks about it does it make a sound?

RichardGarfinkle said:

I thought it was great. Complex character conflicts and backgrounds. Some of the only action sequences I've enjoyed in some time. And it's great that now Marvel and DC have both disproven old Hollywood cliches about needing to have white male leads.

One of my favorite bits was that M'Baku was given a wider more complex role and more nuance than the painful stereotype he's often portrayed as.

The only overly predictable parts lay in the T'Challa's two duels.

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The movie has also produced some of the most thought provoking reviews I've seen in ages.

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There’s a scene toward the end of Ryan Coogler’s record-smashing hit Black Panther in which Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) cuts a woman’s throat. The woman is a member of the Dora Milaje, an all-female special forces unit tasked with protecting the African utopia of Wakanda and its royal family. In a moment that’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quick, Killmonger uses the woman’s body as a shield, while the other Dora Milaje surround them. The woman only has time to say “Wakanda forever” before he kills her and her body hits the ground.


It’s rare to see Okoye (Danai Gurira) — the general of the Dora Milaje and Wakanda’s fiercest warrior — falter in battle, but for just a second, her face crumples in anguish. Then her despair quickly transforms into rage, and she lunges at Killmonger with renewed ferociousness, brandishing her spear.


Though Okoye is romantically involved with W'Kabi (Daniel Kaluuya), and the strength of their relationship saves Wakanda from a bloody civil war, there’s still something about the way Okoye mourns the death of the woman that suggests she might have meant more to her than just a fellow fighter or friend.


Or maybe I’m just reading way too much into this scene just because it reminded me so strongly of other moments from two other major superhero blockbusters over the past year. In Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok from last fall, a flashback of a battle between Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie and the movie’s villain Hela (Cate Blanchett) ends with Valkyrie reaching desperately for one of her fellow female Asgardian warriors, who’s just been killed; there’s a look of agony on Valkyrie’s face. And in last summer’s Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jenkins, when Robin Wright’s Antiope dies early in the movie’s first act — killed by a bullet shot by German soldiers who’ve invaded the mythical all-women island of Themyscira — her right-hand woman, Menalippe (Lisa Loven Kongsli) screams and runs to her side, crying into the sand.


All three movies have been not only celebrated contributions to the renaissance of the superhero film, but also praised for featuring more women and people of color both in front of and behind the cameras than many of their predecessors. They also all invoke the mythology of exclusively women warrior tribes — tribes that, according to the comics from which the movies were adapted, featured a number of queer characters. But you probably wouldn’t know that based on the movies alone — not unless you know where to look. Strong warriors mourning the deaths of their fellow female soldiers, who sure seem like they might have been more than friends, is the kind of subtle queer coding that LGBT viewers have come to expect (a lot of the lesbian and bisexual characters in film and TV these days wind up dead).


Getting queer characters into a movie isn’t as simple a matter as casting. As the critic Mark Harris wrote for Film Comment in an essay about stalled LGBT representation in today’s American cinema, a character isn’t queer unless “a writer figures out a way to make it known.” Mourning a lover can be one of those ways, subtle enough not to rankle the international markets, but significant enough that queer viewers might take the bait. The ever-popular dead-lover trope, whether intentional or not, is one of the laziest sorts of queerbaiting, and beyond its obvious offensiveness — why are so many lesbian or bisexual characters still relatively anonymous, killed, or both in 2018? — at this point it’s mostly just plain boring. Even the more pleasant little maybe-queer moments we’re starting to see in some blockbusters lately (a touch or a glance, a flirty line) amount to pretty lame attempts at LGBT inclusion, which Hollywood is getting outsize credit for. When will we stop seeing the same tired tropes recycled over and over again?

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Alessandra Kelley said:

It’s passed $1 billion in worldwide box office receipts.

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Black Panther zoomed past the billion-dollar mark at box offices worldwide this weekend while earning the No. 1 box-office spot for the fourth week in a row as Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time finished in second place, marking the first time that films by black directors have held the top two spots at the U.S. box office.


According to Box Office Mojo, Black Panther earned $41 million this weekend, making it the first movie with a predominately black cast to make $1 billion worldwide, all while setting a number of other records:

• Its domestic total of $562 million makes it the third-biggest 24-day total of all time behind The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.
• Ryan Coogler becomes only the second black director to direct a $1 billion-dollar-grossing movie, joining F. Gary Gray, who directed The Fate of the Furious.
• Black Panther is the second-highest-grossing comic book superhero movie in North American film history (The Avengers is No. 1 with $623 million ... but seemingly not for much longer.)
• Black Panther is now the seventh-biggest unadjusted domestic-grossing movie of all time.

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Marvel’s first black superhero film Black Panther made a strong debut in China, taking in more than $63 million this weekend and helping it cross the billion-dollar mark globally. And while the film filled seats in China, it didn’t exactly bring in rave reviews from Chinese audiences—in fact, online reviews hint at subtle racism and discomfort with the all-black cast.


Set in Wakanda, a fictional country in East Africa that’s hidden from the outside world, the movie portrayed a romanticized version of Africa that had never been touched by the white man. Led by a cast of black actors and actresses, the film presented how the king of the country, T’Challa, used his intelligence, ancestral knowledge, and access to advance technologies to become the superhero Black Panther.

But the movie—which comes as a timely portrayal and celebration of blackness half a century after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination—is hardly resonating with Chinese audiences. On Douban, China’s IMDb-esque platform, the film holds a 6.8 rating out of 10 (link in Chinese)—almost half of science-fiction and action movies rated by Douban users have a better score. Outside of China, Black Panther is on track to become the highest-rated superhero movie, according to Rotten Tomatoes; 97% of reviews from critics have been positive.


Some moviegoers disliked Black Panther because they felt Marvel was trying too hard to be politically correct (link in Chinese). While many reviewers on Douban stopped short of leaving overtly racist comments about the film, many discussed their discomfort of being surrounded by so much blackness.


“Maybe the Chinese are still not used to a film full of black people,” wrote one reviewer on Douban (link in Chinese). The commenter said he had to pinch himself more than 10 times to stay awake during the movie because “Black Panther is black, all the major characters are black, a lot of scenes are black, the car-chasing scene is black—the blackness has really made me drowsy.”


Another reviewer who came into the theater late made a similar observation: “When I entered the theater, a bunch of black people was fighting in the night… I’ve never been in a theater so dark that I couldn’t find my seat.”


Someone else said the experience was worse in 3D (link in Chinese): “The film is filled with black actors and actresses. Also, because the film’s colors are a bit dark, it’s nearly a torture for the eyes to watch the film’s 3D version in the theater.”

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Ahead of the release of Marvel's "Avengers: Infinity War," the studio's first blockbuster of the year, "Black Panther," continues to rake in money at the domestic box office.

Currently leading the year's ranking of the top five highest-grossing films in the US, "Black Panther" has made over 5 times as much money as any other film released (at the domestic box office).


And as the highly anticipated "Avengers: Infinity War" looks to dethrone "Black Panther" following its release on Friday, Marvel and its parent company, Disney, are set to continue their domination of this year's box office.

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