Do popular comic book characters matter anymore? Last year DC Entertainment released their long-awaited Justice League movie to tepid reviews and weak box office. The film featured three of the most well-known comic book characters in history including Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, yet rather than running out and seeing Justice League fans of the genera went and mostly saw Thor: Ragnarok instead.
Thor might be a well-know character these days but just a few years ago I doubt anyone outside of comic collectors were aware of him.
This has been a theme for Marvel Studios — taking characters few outside of fandom knew of, like Thor, Doctor Strange and Ant Man to name a few, building interesting movies around them and creating substantial movie properties audiences want to see. The biggest of which is the Guardians of the Galaxy, a superhero team that was completely unknown outside of comics fandom prior to their debut 2014. Since then, Guardians of the Galaxy has become a billion dollar franchise with the likes of Starload, Gammora and Groot becoming well-known characters.
So I wonder, does it really matter that audiences might not know who the character of Black Panther is, other than him having a role in the Captain America: Civil War movie a few years ago? And, more important, does it matter for the upcoming Black Panther movie if they don’t?
When I was collecting comics, if Thor, Captain America and Iron Man were second-string characters then Black Panther was a third-string character. At best. In fact, I collected lots and lots of comics from the 1980s to the 1990s and I can’t think of a single issue that featured Black Panther I ever bought. And, even more telling, I can’t think of a time when the character guest-starred in the comics I bought either.
Black Panther was one of the earliest African American superhero characters who was originally introduced in the pages of Fantastic Four in 1966. Black Panther was really T’Challa, king the fictional country of Wakanda that’s concealed from the outside world via special technology. Think Captain America with him being stronger than and faster than the average man yet still mortal and very human and you’re close to what kind of hero Black Panther is.
For a long while, Black Panther was an important character who had his own comic title and would turn up in other titles too. But over time his popularity would wain until he was surpassed by other characters over the years.
So, when I heard a few years ago a Black Panther movie was in the works I was a little surprised. I didn’t know anyone who collected Black Panther comics or was into the character at all. Well, almost no one. Calvin, the son of one of my friends, has been a Black Panther fan for years now. He said he discovered the character via the cartoon The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and had loved him ever since. Calvin said that he liked the idea behind the character, that he’s got a cool costume and is an expert at martial arts.
And now, of course, Calvin’s super-excited about the upcoming Black Panther movie, now in theaters.
Starring Chadwick Boseman as the title character, Michael B. Jordan and Lupita Nyong’o, in the film Black Panther must return home to Wakanda and defend it from outside forces and internal ones like the dreaded “Killmonger” who want to take the country’s riches for themselves.
Here’s the thing — I don’t think it matters at this point whether people, other than Calvin, of course, are all that familiar with Black Panther or not. I think audiences see the Marvel Studios brand as a sort of mark of quality. They mostly know what they’re going to get with a Marvel film and are willing to take a chance on an unknown character like Black Panther since every other time they’ve gone to see a movie from Marvel Studios they’ve had a good time.
And this has paid off handsomely for Marvel, and now Disney, with the top five Marvel Studios movies having earned more than $2 billion at the box office. And that’s just the top five — so far there has been 17 movies from Marvel Studios, the majority of which have been very successful.
So if I were a betting man I’d say that more likely than not, at this time next year Black Panther will be a fan-favorite character to millions of people and not just Calvin.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy takes place in the 1970s within the “Circus,” or the code-name for British intelligence, where a Soviet mole has be discovered in their top echelon. Those in charge might know the mole’s there, but no one’s quite sure exactly who it is that’s feeding the Soviets all the British secrets they can handle. Enter Smiley who was booted out of the agency some time before and can be brought into investigate since he’s the one person everyone’s sure isn’t the traitor.
Altered Carbon begins at some point in the future on a far-off planet where some sort of military agents gun down a terrorist/freedom fighter named Takeshi Kovacs and his girlfriend. Flash forward 250 years further and Kovacs awakens in a new body, known as a sleeve, in San Francisco on Earth. In the future it’s relatively easy for people’s consciousness to be downloaded into new “sleeves” and Kovacs has been awakened to investigate an attempted murder. Well, that person’s sleeve was killed but they had a backup of their consciousness in the cloud and now wants to know who’s out to get him.
Yet I never felt that the first episode of A.P. Bio ever “clicked.” The plot here is that Howerton plays Jack, an ex-college philosophy professor now slumming it as a high school biology teacher in Toledo. Well, “teaching” might be too strong of a word since Jack really has no interest in that and instead wants to use his students to try and ruin another professor who Jack thinks got his job. There’s a question of how is a college professor allowed to teach high school, like did he first get his teaching degree before switching to philosophy and why do all the students in Jack’s class who should realistically be 14 or 15 instead look 24 or 25?
One of the more surprising movie franchises in recent memory is the reboot of the Planet of the Apes films, the second of which was Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. If the first Rise of the Planet of the Apes took place in a modern day where experimentation on apes accidentally leads to them gaining human-levels of intelligence, then this second movie is an all-out post-apocalyptic question of what happens when mankind cedes being the dominant species on the planet to the once lowly ape?
In Annihilation, something happened, no one’s quite sure what, that caused a small coastal village to be surrounded by a barrier that made weird things to occur to everything inside. People vanished, animals mutated and buildings appeared out of nowhere. Now dubbed “Area X,” teams of scientists have been sent in to study it, but few have ever come back and the ones who have seem to be different. Like they might be duplicates with the originals stranded inside.
The most famous of these kinds of stories has got to be Solaris by Stanisław Lem. Lem’s novel deals with a group of scientists studying the ocean-covered planet “Solaris” that isn’t an ordinary planet, it’s somehow able to do things like change its orbit and create artificial clouds and animals from its surface seemingly out of nowhere. As the scientists study Solaris they come to the stark conclusion that the planet is probably a gigantic living organism with a massive, alien intelligence, and that as they study the Solaris, Solaris is also studying them.
It’s theorized that all this alien “stuff” is actually their trash, akin to the garbage a family might leave behind in a meadow after a roadside picnic. And how the animals in the meadow wouldn’t know what to make of our garbage, we don’t know what to make of the alien trash either.
Here, it’s New York in the 19th century and someone is murdering kids. Enter Dr. Laszlo Kreizler (Daniel Bruhl) the “alienst” or proto-psychologist, John Moore (Luke Evans) a newspaper illustrator and Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning) the first female employee of the police department. Kreizler thinks he’s dealt with this murderer in the past with another unsolved case, but will he Moore and Howard be able to stop the killer before he strikes again? Or will the wheels of the 19th century bureaucracy stop them before they’re even able to begin since those in power are already convinced only an insane person could have committed the crimes?
Even the theme of Counterpart, that a seemingly ordinary person is thrown into a world of intrigue and espionage with a more experienced partner is a well-worn TV trope too — the “buddy cop” show.
One of the more controversial movies of the last decade is Zero Dark Thirty. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow of last week’s Strange Days with script from Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty presented a cinematic version of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and the eventual raid on his compound that would lead to him being killed by elite Navy SEALs.