Underseer
Contributor
ComicBookCast on YouTube brings up some good points.
- This will lead to other movie studios making more diverse movies in an attempt to duplicate the success of Black Panther, and that’s good.
- The past shows us that movie executives will blindly copy Black Panther without understanding why it’s popular, and that’s bad.
For example, as the above video suggests, we can easily imagine some movie studio taking the script for a movie that was written for Tom Cruise, race-swapping the lead and most of the supporting roles and expecting to have the same success as Black Panther.
Of course, this won’t work because Black Panther was written from the ground up to be a celebration of black culture and to have a subtext that discusses many black issues. It’s a black movie from the ground up, but one also intended to appeal to more than just people of African descent.
Another problem I anticipate is movie executives failing to understand the differences with a movie intended to appeal to another minority group. I’m American and half Asian, so let’s take that as an example.
One of the things Africans were very excited about is the fact that they were finally getting a movie in which most of the characters were black, that was set in an African country, that had a positive portrayal of an African country, and in which the heroes and villains were both African.
As an Asian-American, my representation needs when it comes to popular media are very different. I don’t need any of the things in the above list. My representation needs are much simpler. Why? Because I can hop on Netflix and watch tons of movies and TV shows made in Asian countries. I already get all the things in the above list. That’s not actually what I want or need out of an American movie that increases representation for me.
Asian-Americans make up 5.6% of the American population. I mostly just want more Asian faces in American movies. Not every movie has to have one out of 20 faces be Asian, but I would like it if the average for all American movies was around 1 in 20. I would like it if 1 in 20 of the protagonists were Asian in American movies. I would prefer Asian-American characters over Asian characters (there’s already plenty of Asian characters in Asian movies). On top of that, I would prefer it if the characters did not involve any unfortunate stereotypes.
If we occasionally got a movie that had symbolism and a subtext about the Asian-American experience (e.g. the way Chinese people were treated in America in the 1800s/1900s and how the worst anti-Chinese law was only repealed when Japanese-Americans became the new target), but I can live without that. I mostly just want what I listed in the previous paragraph.
Oh, and on the topic of unfortunate stereotypes, if we interpret Mantis from Guardians of the Galaxy as an Asian character (I don’t since they changed her from a half-white half-Asian woman into an alien), then she involved that unfortunate innocent-exotic stereotype.
Anyway, my point is that if other studios decide to do this with a movie that does Asian representation and try to imitate the success of Black Panther, they might completely miss the point that Asian-Americans are looking for very different things when it comes to representation than African-Americans want. The things in an American movie that might appeal to Asians overseas could be very different from what appeals to Asian-Americans (both really loved Kung Fu Panda, but that doesn’t mean everything appeals to both).
I’m not even going to pretend to know what Latinx-Americans would want out of representation in a Hollywood movie, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the gangster-like hoodlums in the opening scene of Logan or Ant-Man’s sidekick.
And of course, there is the really big point. Whenever movie studios try to blindly imitate a surprise blockbuster, the one thing they always seem to forget is that the movie must be a good movie before it is anything else. I’m sure you all noticed, but this happens every single time there is a blockbuster that is new and different, and all the other movie studios decide to imitate it.
I’m really glad that Black Panther is probably going to inspire Hollywood to make more diverse movies. It’s one of the reasons I hoped Black Panther would do well. I’m just not looking forward to some of the cringe-inducing growing pains I expect in the coming years.
