Yes, Disney Thinks Black Panther Is Best Picture-Worthy
“I don’t think that at any point in the process did we feel like this could be an awards movie,” says Marvel executive Nate Moore. “But we did feel like this could have depth in a way that our movies don’t always do.”
“My son, it is your time,” Angela Bassett’s Queen Ramonda said to Chadwick Boseman’s soon-to-be-anointed-king T’Challa way back in the first trailer Disney released for its Marvel movie Black Panther. How right the queen turned out to be. Since its release in February, the film has grossed more than $1.3 billion at the global box office and earned effusive praise from critics. The movie and its stars, including Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, and Danai Gurira, satisfied a hunger many had to see themselves represented on- screen, and obliterated a pernicious Hollywood myth that international audiences won’t buy tickets to movies with predominantly black casts. In May, as Black Panther’s writer-director, Ryan Coogler, introduced an outdoor screening of his film at the hallowed Cannes Film Festival, French children in beach chairs began to shout “L’auteur! L’auteur!” in a charmingly Gallic salute to Coogler and his cinematic vision.
Black Panther has clearly already done a great deal for the culture. And audiences have moved on to other adventurers for the summer, from its Marvel brethren in Avengers: Infinity War to the animated superheroes of Incredibles 2 to Tom Cruise hanging off a helicopter in Mission: Impossible–Fallout. But T’Challa may need to slide on his sleek suit for one more important rescue: Black Panther may have to save the Oscars. In an era when the awards show has lost audience, relevance, and its place as a communal cultural moment, Coogler’s comic-book movie delivered on all three, and did so with a level of style and craft that rose above its peers in the genre. Black Panther doesn’t need the Oscars to have its place in history cemented, but the Oscars may need Black Panther.
Instead, movies that drew narrower audiences, such as The Hurt Locker, The Artist, and Spotlight, have prevailed. The most watched Oscars ever was aired 20 years ago, when 55.2 million people tuned in to see Titanic win best picture—a box-office juggernaut and cultural phenomenon with photogenic young stars and an inescapable radio ballad. This year, the top prize went to The Shape of Water, another love story, but one in which the Leonardo DiCaprio role belonged to a sea monster. Some of that shift reflects just how much the major studios have changed, how they’ve left the work of telling many of the most original big-screen stories to independent distributors, taking up instead films with known brands that are easy to sell to international audiences. Black Panther manages to thread a needle: though based on a comic-book character created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966, and buoyed by the incredible marketing machinery of Disney and Marvel, it feels wholly like Coogler’s original story. To borrow from the French kids on the beach, it’s an auteur film, its Afro-futurist world bearing unmistakably the stamp of its Oakland-born writer-director. “A lot of our films, I think very rightfully and hopefully successfully, just feel like pieces of pure escapism,” said Nate Moore, Marvel Studios vice president of development and production. “This movie attempts to do more. It attempts to make people think about the world that’s around them and celebrate, frankly, a continent, in Africa, that’s often overlooked. I don’t think that at any point in the process did we feel like this could be an awards movie. But we did feel like this could have depth in a way that our movies don’t always do.” For his part, Coogler has some experience making crowd-pleasing movies that awards voters realize they need to take seriously. His Rocky reboot, Creed, surpassed most critics’ expectations that it would be a simple nostalgia play, and helped earn Sylvester Stallone a supporting-actor nomination.
When we peer at the coming Oscar season from the hazy, uncertain days of summer, Black Panther is just one of a handful of studio movies that look likely to mix prestige and populism in a way that could entice broader audiences to tune in to next year’s show. First Man, from Universal, re-teams Ryan Gosling with his La La Land director, Damien Chazelle, in a historical drama about Neil Armstrong’s race to the moon. In A Star Is Born, from Warner Bros., Bradley Cooper directs and stars in an update of the classic show-business story, with Lady Gaga in the role that earned Janet Gaynor and Judy Garland best-actress nominations, and Barbra Streisand a win for original song, in its three previous feature-film iterations. And Mary Poppins Returns, from Disney, places Emily Blunt in the title role and has Lin-Manuel Miranda singing and dancing Dick Van Dyke–style. “None of these are movies where somebody’s dying,” said one Academy voter. “It’s not the year of the little movie. Maybe this is the year where the Oscars will actually be relatable to my cousins.”
For Black Panther to navigate the gauntlet of awards season, Disney will have to work its marketing magic with Oscar voters, extending invitations to special screenings, making the film’s cast and craftspeople available, and leaning in to the inclusivity of the film, which saw women and minorities playing key roles both behind and in front of the camera, such as cinematographer Rachel Morrison, costume designer Ruth E. Carter, and production designer Hannah Beachler. The studio, for all its box-office firepower, has rarely garnered Oscar nominations outside of the animation, visual-effects, and original-song categories in recent years. In 2016, Mark Rylance won the supporting-actor Oscar for Bridge of Spies, which Disney distributed with Twentieth Century Fox, but the studio has not had a best-picture nomination since 2012’s Lincoln or been a major Oscar player with its live-action films since it sold the specialty division Miramax in 2010. (One prize Disney would collect in its planned acquisition of 21st Century Fox is the specialty division Fox Searchlight, a veritable Oscar-minting factory that collected 20 nominations this year and won best picture for The Shape of Water.)
Of course, Disney would like Black Panther to be in the Oscar race for all the usual reasons—the burnishing of egos being a primary one. But the studio has an extra incentive to push a movie that could bring eyeballs to the Oscars: Disney owns ABC, the channel that has been the home of the Oscars since 1976, and retains the broadcast rights to the telecast through 2028. In addition to best picture, Black Panther could be expected to contend in all the major technical categories, as well as in writing for Coogler and his co-writer, Joe Robert Cole; directing; supporting actor for Jordan; and original song for Kendrick Lamar.
The comic-book movie would have to overcome the biases many Academy members harbor toward the genre. A decade ago, the group’s failure to nominate Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, considered by many the height of the form, inspired major changes to Oscar rules. After that year’s ceremony, the Academy expanded the number of nominations for best picture from 5 films to a possible 10, in a bid to nudge more blockbusters into the race. Yet in the last 10 years, an era when superhero movies have dominated the business side of the industry, and some, like Logan and Wonder Woman last year, earned serious critical bona fides, not a single caped crusader has been nominated for best picture. “Sometimes it feels as if movies based on comics are penalized because of the source material,” said Moore, who was invited to join the Academy this year. “Look, the truth is all of us here at Marvel love the Academy Awards, and so all of us, in our heart of hearts, go, ‘Oh, wouldn’t that be so cool if one day that could happen?’ Ultimately the movie’s for the fans, but critics and people who review these films for the Academy are fans, too.” Well, some of them are fans, anyway. One executive-branch Academy member said to me about Black Panther: “It’s fine. It’s just not a movie made for me. I remember when studios spent that kind of money on Lawrence of Arabia, not a comic book.”
If pressures from streaming companies like Netflix continue, it’s easy to imagine the nostalgia vote 20 years from now going to a “classic” studio picture like Black Panther, a vestige of the halcyon days of 2018, when audiences still bothered to leave their homes to see any movie at all. Just what constitutes an awards movie—a movie “made for me,” in the parlance of this Academy member—is changing, as the industry group is in the midst of strategically evolving its membership. In June, the Academy invited 928 new members to join, the largest and most diverse class in its history, in a step toward hitting ambitious inclusion goals the organization has said it aims to reach by 2020. Will an Academy that is less white and less male find more in common with the everyday moviegoers who flocked to Black Panther?
It might. So far, 2018 has been an impressive year at the U.S. box office, with ticket sales up 8 percent midway through. Much of that uptick has been shouldered by the Disney superhero movies Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, and Incredibles 2. The rise has followed a period of declines and dire predictions about the future of the moviegoing experience, and it suggests that reports of the death of the movie theater have been greatly exaggerated. The big screen still matters—what better time for the Oscars to reclaim it.