Why Was the Black Panther Film So Popular?

The Black Panther comic book superhero has long been a Marvel fan favourite, especially among comic enthusiasts of colour. But when the Wakandan prince took to the big screen in 2018 as the lead in his own movie, his story shattered box-office records, took over the Internet, and inspired millions. Black Panther was nominated for seven Academy Awards—including Best Picture—and won three. In 2020, two years after its debut, Black Panther had a 96% “Fresh” score on film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. Given all this buzz, what exactly made Black Panther such a groundbreaking film?

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Black Panther picks up immediately after Captain America: Civil War. Wakandan King T’Chaka having been killed in a terrorist attack, Prince T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) returns to Wakanda and engages in ritual combat to become the Black Panther. But once he is king, T’Challa receives a challenger: Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), a rogue U.S. Black ops soldier with ties to the royal bloodline. Killmonger is well aware of Wakanda’s secret hoard of vibranium, the rare and near-indestructible metal ore that has catapulted the isolationist country’s technology ahead of every other civilization. Killmonger wants to bring Wakanda out of isolation. He plans to use vibranium to make Wakanda the standard-bearer of a global Black revolution.

A significant amount of Black Panther’s praise stems from its race- and gender-conscious casting and costuming. It boasts the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first Black director, Ryan Coogler; an almost entirely Black lead cast; and a number of Black women in powerful and engaging roles. Take, for example, the Dora Milaje, a squadron of spear-wielding women warriors tasked with protecting T’Challa. Two of their members, Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) and Okoye (Danai Gurira), are pivotal characters throughout the film; the latter is general of this intimidating armed force. Their costuming reflects much of Wakanda’s syncretic culture: the Dora Milaje wear the stacked neck rings worn by the Ndebele women of South Africa, while their beaded uniforms feature beading in the Maasai and Turkana traditions. Because of the costuming and production work of Ruth E. Carter and Hannah Beachler—both Black women themselves—Black Panther won the Academy Awards for Best Costume Design and Best Production Design.

But beneath the visual brilliance of Black Panther is a central tension that is familiar to many Black Americans. Writing for The New Yorker, Jelani Cobb frames this tension as the same one that exists in the term “African-American,” with “a hyphen standing in for the brutal history that intervened between Africa and America.” The transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans tore as many as 12 million people from their homes and shipped them to all corners of the Western world. These enslaved people and their free descendants are connected to Africa by blood, but the lasting scar of slavery is their being alien to their ancestral cultures. With this in mind, Black Panther asks: What might it look like for Black life, left undisturbed, to be self-determined and independent? Who is welcomed into this reimagining? Who is left on the margins?

T’Challa’s Wakanda is, in many ways, a locus of Black independence and self-determination. It would likely have been idyllic for many early Black nationalists and pan-Africanists such as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. Writing for The New York Times Magazine, Carvell Wallace argues that these visionaries are part of a line of Black forebears who “have populated the Africa of our imagination with our most yearning attempts at self-realization.” He paraphrases Nina Simone as saying that this tradition of imagining was “an attempt to picture a place where there was no fear.” Wakanda certainly seems to be fearless: free from the shackles of white colonialism, it prospers in solitude as a mecca of Black advancement. Its culture borrows from civilizations in every corner of Africa. The result is a model for Black success. And importantly, this paradise is preserved only through its deliberate seclusion; its prosperity depends on exclusivity.

But is a utopia like Wakanda actually paradise if it can’t be accessed by all Black people? For Killmonger, the answer is no. While Black people are oppressed around the world, Wakanda places walls around its wealth and comfort. Killmonger believes that Wakanda has a duty to the diaspora. While he understands that leaving isolation may upend Wakanda’s delicate society, he is willing to pay that price to secure global Black liberation. In his view, the path to liberation will be violent, bloody, and paved with vibranium. Futuristic technology notwithstanding, Killmonger’s radical ideology has real historical underpinnings, as Adam Serwer notes in an article for The Atlantic magazine. It echoes the Black Panther Party’s “Ten-Point Program,” which outlined a party platform grounded in Marxism and Black nationalism. Killmonger’s call for a global, violent Black revolution is very similar to the Black Panther Party’s late-1960s rhetoric, which emphasized the international tenor of liberation and implied that such a struggle would be armed if necessary.

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The ideological clash between T’Challa and Killmonger is a complicated one, but it is also a major reason why Black Panther had such a strong appeal. A review on RogerEbert.com describes these powerful characters as “two sides of the same coin,” and their journeys “have a way of burrowing into your skin.” Indeed, their twin avenues to self-determination may have left many moviegoers discomfited. But, as the film’s resolution suggests, these paths are not necessarily divergent. Homeland and diaspora, prosperity and liberation—though the film at first presents them as binaries, these concepts might be reconcilable in a Black future of self-determination.