Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther was a major milestone in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as with a $1.3 billion collection at the box office, it showed there’s plenty of appetite among moviegoers to venture into new worlds and cultures.
The stand-alone story of T’Challa, heir to the hidden but advanced kingdom of Wakanda, earned plenty of plaudits for incorporating race and gender-conscious themes, without compromising the narrative strength of the movie. The same was recognized at the Academy Awards in 2019, with the film securing seven nominations and winning three Oscars in the process – a rare feat for any movie, let alone an action-packed superhero movie.
Interestingly, Boseman’s brilliant performance as the first black superhero in the MCU, also opened doors for Asian actors to show their mettle in a leading role.
How Black Panther Inspired Marvel President Kevin Feige to Back Simu Liu’s Shang-Chi
Kevin Feige is one of the most successful producers in Hollywood’s history. He played an absolute blinder in roping in a seemingly controversial star at the time, Robert Downey Jr. for Iron Man. Not only the success of Tony Stark’s story in 2008 change the actor’s fortunes but also kick-started the industry’s biggest franchise, the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
After setting the foundation for the MCU, Feige continued making the right decisions and brought in Chris Evans to play Captain America, which proved to be another masterstroke. However, the 50-year-old took some time to realize there’s more than one superhero blueprint and introduced T’Challa in 2016 hit Captain America: Civil War.
Black Panther followed in 2018 and turned out to be one of the best Marvel movies ever made. Incidentally, the excitement around it, particularly among the African-American community, also opened Feige’s eyes to more such projects. He recalled a moving experience in an interview with Empire:
“I remember seeing a viral video when the Black Panther poster first came out. It was some young men in a movie theatre overwhelmed with excitement at seeing the poster, and it was moving because people were excited about the movie we were making. But it was also a harsh realization that they were reacting that way because they had not seen it before. So Panther really coalesced the notion of, ‘Everybody deserves to see themselves portrayed in these larger-than-life ways.'”
On the back of the success of Black Panther at the box office and the reactions it received in general, Marvel Studios got even more confidence to give the green flag to Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), and fans got their first Asian superhero in Simu Liu‘s Shang-Chi.
What Simu Liu’s Shang-Chi Director Said About Seeing Asian Superhero in MCU
Simu Liu landed the responsibility of leading Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, wherein we see Shang-Chi, a martial artist confront the ghosts of his father’s past in the form of the Ten Rings.
Destin Daniel Cretton, who directed Black Panther star Michael B. Jordan’s Just Mercy in 2019, got the nod to sit on the director’s chair to capture Shang-Chi’s adventures. The Japanese-American filmmaker beautifully summed up his thoughts on the idea of seeing an Asian superhero on the big screen, stating to Empire:
“I grew up with Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan and Jet Li. But I haven’t seen a hero on screen that really walks and talks like me, dresses like me, listens to the music that me and my friends listen to; somebody truly Asian-American. And that was what was really exciting to me, to create something that just shows the Asian-American experience through the eyes of a budding superhero.”
Financially, this proved to be another good move from Feige, with the movie grossing over $432 million globally, and becoming the ninth-highest-grossing movie of 2021.
Source: Empire
