With Marvel Studio’s Black Panther on the horizon, spouting all sorts of racial rhetoric about it being historic and things other than a comic book movie, Washington Post contributor Sonny Bunch drops Mjolnir on the truth of the matter: before Black Panther, there was Blade.
Obviously, Blade happened way before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and long before there was an odd existence of Marvel movies between FOX, Sony, and whomever produced the turds of Ben Affleck’s Daredevil, Nicolas Cage’s Ghost Rider, and the poor Jessica Alba Fantastic Fours that I’m too lazy to expend the few seconds to Google.
But for all intents and purposes, Blade is still a Marvel property, and therefore seeing as how the title of the film is named after him, makes him the first ever Marvel production starring a black person in the titular role. As much as the internet and the rest of the world really want to claim Black Panther is this evolutionary revolutionary, in the grand spectrum of comic book films, it’s really not. It’s just another addition to a library that’s way bigger than lots of people want to believe, for the sake of pushing a very expensive agenda in order to expedite the recouping of a gargantuan budget.
I love this article because Bunch does a great job of anticipating arguments to his article, and stomps them out before they can even be made, like pointing out all the other films, as small and as obscure as they may have been, being made in ages prior to the current internet, that have long beaten Black Panther to the punch as far as identifying black directors, black soundtracks, and other black things that are especially under the microscope now that we’ve traversed into February, the vaunted Black History Month.
I hope he dropped a mic after this piece went to publish.
Like seriously, he mentions shit like Meteor Man and the Shaquille O’Neal-starring Steel. Just because they weren’t produced with Marvel and Disney fuck-you-money doesn’t mean that they have to yield the front of the bus to Black Panther. Maybe the hype machine should’ve lowered their bar and gone after categories like “all black movie with black people that used catering companies owned and operated by primarily black people” or something. Surely, if they temper their aspirations for history to more realistic categories, they’d be sure to hit some serious home runs.
Either way, I loved this article. I’m sure Black Panther will be an awesome movie, and I will in all likelihood check it out in theaters. I’m very curious to why so much of it had to take place in Seoul, when Black Panther’s own little world is centralized around Wakanda, a fictional country in Africa that’s leaps and bounds ahead of the world it particular technologies and combat, but I’m sure it’ll be explained in a clever way. But again, let’s not go into the film thinking it’s the cinema equivalent to the desegregation of schools; let’s just hope it’s an awesome film, and a solid contribution to the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe, and nothing more.
