'Black Panther' Box Office Triumph Puts Disney In A Tricky Spot
Scott Mendelson, CONTRIBUTOR
Apr 12, 201811:00 AM1,801
Walt Disney and Marvel
‘Black Panther’
There aren’t a lot of records left for Black Panther to break at this juncture. It’ll climb further up the inflation-adjusted domestic earners list, with a total over $687 million putting it in 30th place and above the adjusted cumes of The Dark Knight and Thunderball. It will also make its way up the list of leggiest $100m+ openers as it’s currently in 13th place, even though three of the leggier movies (Shrek 2, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Revenge of the Sith) opened on a Wednesday or Thursday. The last big question is whether it can make it past the $1.33 billion global total of Star Wars: The Last Jedi to take the ninth-place slot on the global grossers list.
If the film has $1.3 billion worldwide and $667 million domestic, and I’m arguing that it has around $20m left in the domestic tank, then it isn’t that much of a stretch for it to find another $10m overseas even though it made only $5m overseas last weekend. It’s going to be awfully close one way or another. But here’s the question: Does
Walt Disney want
Black Panther to pass the unadjusted global cume of
Star Wars: The Last Jedi? Walt Disney is in a strange place right now, where the overperformance of the MCU stand-alone flick puts potentially undue pressure on the rest of their biggies. Does
Black Panther’s overperformance create unrealistic expectations for
Infinity War and
Solo: A Star Wars Story?
While few pundits expect
Avengers: Infinity War to outgross
Black Panther in North America, there is the presumption that the MCU team-up flick will make up for it overseas for a global total at least on par with
Black Panther. This now creates a much higher bar to clear whereby
Infinity War almost has to look at $1.3 billion as the bar for success. On its face, especially if it’s good, an
Infinity War that makes $999 million isn’t exactly a disaster. Yet consider how much handwringing we got three years ago when
Age of Ultron “only” made $459m domestic and $1.4b worldwide. There would have been a lot less pressure on
Infinity War had
Black Panther grossed
Spider-Man: Homecoming or
Thor: Ragnarok-level numbers.
The
Star Wars situation is more complicated. In a media cycle where everyone seems to be itching to declare Disney’s
Star Wars franchise as being in peril (despite three consecutive $1 billion+ grossers, generally positive reviews and decent audience buzz), it may not be a net positive for Walt Disney (which is a publicly-traded company whose stock price can theoretically be affected by negative media narratives) to have
Black Panther topping
The Last Jedi in global grosses. However insane this may seem, and
Black Panther and
The Last Jedi are two of Disney’s best live-action movies since (at least)
Pete’s Dragon, the handwringing over the
Star Wars franchise because
The Last Jedi “only” made $1.33b worldwide won’t be helped by MCU’s underdog superhero triumph passing it in global grosses.
The post-debut media narratives around
The Last Jedi only creates more pressure for
Solo: A Star Wars Story. Even with the behind-the-scenes melodrama, this May’s prequel should have been viewed as a freebie after two successful “episodes” and the well-received
Rogue One surviving post-production hell to come through with solid reviews and a $1 billion+ global gross. The media is still
occasionally trying to position the
Star Wars franchise as being in some kind of peril because some folks online went all #NotMyStarWars with
The Last Jedi and because that sequel wasn’t as big or as leggy as
The Force Awakens. This,
Solo finds itself as a weird spot where it is both an underdog and has something to prove beyond artistic justification for its existence.
Black Panther making “all the money” isn’t retroactively responsible (financially or morally) for the higher expectations for
Avengers: Infinity War or the narrative surrounding Lucasfilm’s
Star Wars movies, which itself is partially a result of the skewed conversation concerning
The Last Jedi. Moreover, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if
Black Panther out-grossed
Avengers: Infinity War,
Solo: A Star Wars Story (which is, potential quality notwithstanding, a cynical concoction rooted in conventional wisdom about what makes a blockbuster) or even Pixar’s
The Incredibles 2 (which, likely quality notwithstanding, is a nostalgia-driven cash-in sequel that also upholds conventional wisdom about what makes a hit movie). This situation isn’t that different from Disney’s
Zootopia and
The Jungle Book crushing it before summer and thus potentially setting up higher expectations for Marvel’s
Captain America: Civil War and Pixar’s
Finding Dory.
Now the counterpoint to all of this, presuming that the next three Disney flicks don’t outright crush it worldwide, is that Disney can sell the line that Disney is such a strong tentpole distributor that only a Disney movie can outperform another Disney movie. Save for
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (or the likes of
Skyscraper or
Mission: Impossible Fallout catching fire), that may prove true this summer. If
Avengers: Infinity War makes “all the money” in two weeks and if
Solo: A Star Wars Story earns good reviews and (arguably)
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales-level box office, then this will all be trivia. But this all goes to show that one of Disney’s “problems” right now is that they have almost too many big-scale franchises all kicking butt at the same time.
Although to be fair, Disney’s market share domination allows it to avoid too much scrutiny when the likes of
Cars 3 and
A Wrinkle in Time outright bomb. We may not see another film earning as much as
Black Panther in North America until (maybe)
Teen Titans GO to the Movies! Star Wars 9 or
Avatar 2.
Black Panther’s overwhelming success is both a huge win for Disney (along with civilization in general) and places arguably higher expectations on
Infinity War and does leave the
Star Wars franchise in a different place. The “bad” news is that T’Challa has put that much more pressure on the rest of his Avenger buddies and may give ammunition to the “
Last Jedi ruined
Star Wars!” crowd if the
Ryan Coogler MCU action drama ends up passing Rian Johnson’s sci-fi sequel. The good news is that, at this level of tentpole filmmaking, Walt Disney’s only real competition may be Walt Disney.
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