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Black Panther is both a good movie, and a socially significant movie for being the most successful movie ever about a predominantly black cast. Without a doubt, this is a watershed moment. Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. You see, if you're talking about social significance in America, which is what most people are concerned with, you have to look specifically at its domestic gross. It's still sitting pretty comfortable, because it easily surpassed the previous record holder for highest grossing superhero debut, Wonder Woman (I have conflicting feelings about that, seeing as she's one of my all-time favorites). Except the long-time record holder, Spider-Man, actually still holds the top spot for that superlative when you adjust for inflation, and earned a domestic total slightly higher than The Avengers. Then you look at other statistics that have been adjusted for inflation, which I find interesting. Currently, Black Panther sits at around $520 million. It's on track to out-earn The Avengers' unadjusted total, and I'm going to just assume that it will finish its run at around $650 million. Counting up from there, I'm looking at what records will remain unbroken. My numbers come from Box Office Mojo, under the category of all-time top grossing films adjusted for inflation. Assuming a $650 million final run, Black Panther would rank #36 in the all-time domestic box office. It will have outgrossed Episode VIII, and also the original Spider-Man at $637 million. That truly would be a ground-breaking achievement. Interestingly enough, it would be sitting just above the final gross of Home Alone, which remained top at the box office for weeks and weeks to become the undisputed highest grossing comedy of all time (and rightfully so), at $621 million. However, The Dark Knight would still outrank Black Panther's domestic total, with $683 million. That's going to be hard to beat. The Avengers, once adjusted, actually reaches $705 million. That's impressive! Going up the list a bit, you have some iconic feel-good movies like Mary Poppins and Forrest Gump., at $717 and $721 million, respectively. Both of them were nominated for Best Picture, and the latter won, which is a nice reminder that the Academy doesn't only acknowledge films that nobody has seen. That's only a relatively recent trend, actually, started in the last fifteen years (Remember when Lord of the Rings won Best Picture?). Actually, speaking of things that won Best Picture, and that are often cited as examples of how Hollywood only seems to love serious dramas that nobody cares about, it might surprise some people to find out that The Godfather wasn't just some boring drama that nobody saw. It grossed $724 million! What the heck? Outside of Star Wars and James Cameron movies, such success these days is unheard of nowadays. That movie was a certified cultural phenomenon, and its legacy today shows that. It doesn't live on as one of the Greats just because the Academy gave it a trophy. Similarly, The Graduate earned $785 million. If you want something more in the genre of action-adventure set in foreign lands with plenty of McGuffins, featuring a charming wish-fulfillment hero, it's hard to top the financial and cultural legacy of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, which grossed a whopping $812 million! And I hardly need to say a thing about how significant it was in the development of cinema and Steven Spielberg's career. Nobody has even come close to Indiana Jones' legacy within the adventure-archaeologist genre, not Brendan Frasier, not Lara Croft, not LEGO's knock-off version, not, well, anyone. Everyone within that genre is defined by how much they manage to distinguish themselves from Dr. Jones. Now here's an interesting one, which is more related to Wonder Woman than Black Panther: The highest grossing film directed by a woman is actually The Sting. It's a pretty great film, with one of the best twists and overall one of the best-structured screenplays I've ever seen. $818 million. How about films set in Africa? The Lion King also earned $818 million. It didn't have a black cast, since it was animated and had animals for its main characters, so it isn't quite comparable. Still, it's interesting. You also have to factor in The Lion King's success on the stage, where it has earned SIX BILLION DOLLARS. Literally no other single movie or play has even come close. After that, you have all of the usual suspects. Jaws, E.T., James Cameron movies, Doctor Zhivago, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, The Sound of Music, STAR WARS episodes I;VI;V;VII;IV (in that order), and then, sitting comfortably at the #1 spot is the remarkably racist sensation known as Gone With the Wind, which will be hard to beat with its $1.85 billion with a b. Somewhat surprisingly, 101 Dalmations fits into the Top 12. Who knew? So yeah. I guess it makes you look at success differently. The question is, what do you get from that? Because success isn't just a number. You don't have to sell the most tickets of all time to be heard, just enough to make a difference in your own time. One thing to bear in mind is that a lot of these movies had less competition. Black Panther comes out in an era where there are a couple of effects-heavy movies every month. It has to compete with all of those, and people can only buy so many tickets per year. Before we start singing Auld Lang Syne again, the big studios are also going to release Deadpool 2, The Avangers: Infinity War, Ant Man and the Wasp, The Incredibles II, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, Venom, and Aquaman, and those are only the movies that are vying for the super-hero audience. There are plenty of other blockbusters trying to stake out their territory on the calendar. It takes a lot more to stand out in this movie climate. There's another way of looking at this. While movies like The Sting and The Lion King far and away outperform today's milestones for women-directed and Africa-centric films, you'd think that those would have been watershed moments. You'd think that after The Sting, you'd start having a lot more movies with successful women directors. However, it didn't start a movement. The Lion King made it conceivable that movies about African civilizations could be solid blockbuster material, but all it really did was cement its own legacy and prolong Disney's Renaissance period for a little while longer. it didn't contribute to any larger social patterns in cinema that I know of. Because of these earlier successes, we knew what potential there was and I'm hardly surprised at the successes of films like Wonder Woman and Black Panther, but why did it take so long for us to the point where we could talk about these? Why was there nothing really serious in-between? What's significant about Wonder Woman and Black Panther isn't that they're milestones, but that they're watershed moments. A milestone is merely a record-holder, and a record-holder can be an outlier. A watershed moment changes everything that comes after it. What's significant about Wonder Woman and Black Panther isn't that they are the first films of their kind to ever be successful or even that they're the most successful, but rather the sense that in the near-future these movies won't be outliers but rather the beginning of a pattern. Also, The Sting may have been directed by a woman, but it starred men. The Lion King was set in Africa, but as I already mentioned, most of the talents behind it had no connection to Africa. Wonder Woman is unique in that it's a movie about a woman by a woman, and similar things can be said about Black Panther. I appreciate their success, and I hope that we begin to see more diversity in films. There are certain people groups and cultures and locations that cinema simply hasn't seen the potential in yet, and the exploration of these new genres remains critically undeveloped. There are so many places where cinema can go that it hasn't gone yet, and I'd hate for it to get stale by going back to the same cast of characters every single time. 24601

Fixed.