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A comment on Where are all the films about poor Americans?. Parent comment

Re:Where are all the films about poor Americans? by Lukeas14 on Monday March 05, 2018 @04:45PM (#16524758)
I think you're missing the reason why people are excited about Black Panther. It actually has more to do with the motivation of profit than representation. Obviously there have been several decades of positive black cinema but the audience for those movies was always intended to be strictly "urban". And their small budgets reflected the assumption that studios thought only a small subsection of America would be interested in a black movie.

Black panther proved for the first time that you could put $200m behind a movie with a predominantly black cast, market it to mainstream America and still make $1b in revenue. Marvel/Disney's primary motivation was still profit. There's no way they would've green-lighted(greenlit?) that movie if they thought they would lose money on it.

So it's not about representation just for representation's sake. But rather celebrating the fact that representation is no longer held back due to a lack of profit.

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Re:Where are all the films about poor Americans? by lurquer on Monday March 05, 2018 @05:04PM (#16524901)
Ray, Ali, Color Purple, Glory, Django, Cotton Club, Boyz in the Hood, Friday, Malcolm X, Bad Boys, Barbershop, and of course, New Jack City.

Each of these movies did great and reached a wide demographic. As did Black Panther. The only difference is that Black Panther's marketing propogated this ridiculous myth that it was the first black superhero movie. (Sorry, Wesley Snipes, Will Smith, and Halle Berre... you're down the memory hole.) Or, even more absurd, that it is the first all-black cast that has done well at the box office.

Just shows how powerful marketing is.

More power to them... I've lived through several iterations of "'brand-new' microfiber technology that make cleaning up spills a snap!" I suppose I can live through endless repetitions of "the very first movie with a real-live black person in it!" Whatever....

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