Ignoring everything that happened at the end of Avengers: Infinity War, things are looking up for anybody involved with Black Panther. That obviously includes director Ryan Coogler, who is at Cannes right now talking about the experience of making the most successful black superhero movie ever, and one of the most successful superhero movies, period. He also talked about the possibility of a spinoff featuring just the female characters from Wakanda, who proved nearly as popular as Black Panther himself.
During the course of the film, there comes a stretch of time when T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) is no longer present. It’s during that time when the women in his life step up and take over, and that’s when Coogler realized he may have something special just with them…
“There is a whole section of the film where T’Challa [Chadwick Boseman] is out of the movie and you are just following the women,” Coogler says assuming everyone in the theater has seen the movie by this point. “And thats one of my favorite parts of the movie when I watched it. And I didn’t expect that.”
“Everybody thinks he’s dead and there is a good chunk of time left in the movie and the women actually save him and bring him back and that part of the movie you feel like you’re watching something fresh and new. That part of it was exciting. We have these actresses who could easily carry their own movie. Some of them have before. We had an embarrassment of riches with Lupita, Letitia [Wright], Danai [Gurira], Angela [Bassett]. And we were so fortunate. So when that part of the movie happens I’m like, ‘I wanna watch this movie. I’d watch this movie with just them.’”
Of course, that led to the question of whether Coogler would direct a female Black Panther spinoff, to which he replied, “That would be amazing if the opportunity came up. They did it in the comic-book version.”
Coogler is referring to Shuri, who takes over as Black Panther in the comics. There have been other stories that follow members of T’Challa’s royal guard, the Dora Milaje.
Black Panther is, for the time being, the #1 movie in the world with $1.33B. A sequel is already in the works and you can bet Marvel is going to do everything possible to get the most out of this franchise. It’s a business, after all, a fact that hasn’t escaped Coogler in the least…
“At the end of the day it’s a business and the business is informed by all these things that life is informed by. Colonization, institutional, bias, racism. All these things. The business was built amongst all these things, but the truth is what I kept telling myself is because I was an athlete. I’m not anymore. There was a time. Now, I’m like ‘Can I make it up that ramp without falling?’ [Laughs] But, there was a time not that long ago that my dad would tell me that owners of American baseball teams would say ‘I don’t know if we put black and hispanic players on the field that people would still come to the games.’ There was a time in basketball where there were no black people in the NBA and it’s because people thought people wouldn’t come to the games. I was born in ’86. I came up in the ’90s I think in the NBA everybody’s black. Everyone in the stands is usually mixed bag, but mostly white but they have on the black players jerseys. That’s the world I grew up in. So, for me, it was ‘Why can’t film have more black movies?’ People say maybe these films don’t travel but for us it was like, ‘I don’t know if that’s the case.’ And it was great to have partners in Marvel and Disney who were excited about that as well. We didn’t feel like we were the only ones banging the drum.” [Variety]
