Over the long holiday weekend, Black Panther smashed box-office records, amassing a historic $235 million four-day opening gross, according to estimates by its distributor Disney. Exceeding even the most optimistic prerelease “tracking” estimates by more than $50 million, the rapturously reviewed, Marvel-produced Wakandan action epic also obliterated the previous record for a February film: Deadpool’s $152 million Presidents’ Day weekend haul. And despite arriving in theaters at a time of year known as Hollywood’s dumping ground for crappy movies, Panther is now on track to become one of 2018’s biggest hits, performing along the lines of last summer’s Wonder Woman, which took in $821.8 million worldwide.
But more crucially, Black Panther became a cultural phenomenon in the process — the first global superhero blockbuster written and directed by an African-American filmmaker, Ryan Coogler, starring a predominantly black cast (including Lupita Nyong’o, Letitia Wright, and Michael B. Jordan) and plotted around a lesser-known but much beloved African comic book character, T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman). Playing as a “four-quadrant” film that appealed to men and women, young and old alike, Panther surpassed 2015’s Jurassic World to log the the third-highest four-day gross in history, and took in $169 million outside the U.S.— transcending its genre to become something both more significant and more elusive than just a tentpole film: an inescapable part of the national conversation.
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