What Does Black Panther's Success Prove? | The Diamond K Morning Show

RadioOnFire.com - At the end of Marvel’s “Black Panther”, I heard nothing but applause from the audience. Disney arrived with a record-breaking bang at the box office, outperforming pre-opening estimates for its three day U.S./Canada opening. 

On this episode: What Does Black Panther's Success Prove? | The Diamond K Morning Show 

via indiewire “Black Panther” bests “Deadpool” by more than $50 million as the best February and pre-March opening weekends ever. It tops last year’s “Beauty and the Beast” as the best pre-May debut of all time. It nearly doubles “Furious 7” as the best opening for a black-directed film. It is triple the best previous record (held by “Straight Outta Compton”) for initial weekend of a film with a primarily black cast.

Those numbers will be re-counted when Sunday’s actual numbers are reported, plus the boost the movie will get from a four-day semi-holiday on Monday. And adjusting to an even playing field still leaves “Black Panther” remarkably (considering the month of release) among the ten best openers ever.

I arrived at AMC 30 minutes before showtime only to find out 3:00 PM showing was sold out. No big deal because the next one was only 1 hour later. I purchased tickets and started a line near theater #9. Within 20 minutes the 4:00 pm showing was also sold out and a 150 or so eager movie goers stood behind me. Needless to say I LOVED the film! The story, the acting, the directing, the messages. It made me happy and proud. Still, something about giving Disney all that money makes me uncomfortable. I myself I only spent $22 dollars in AMC but my last count of "Black Panther's" receipts were well over $200 million for the opening weekend. People came out big for this movie. Let me rephrase that, black people came out big for this movie. In my theater the ratio was 1% white, 1% spanish and 98% black. 

It had me wondering, when we (black people) are going to harness our massive economic power and support our businesses. There are some black films from black production companies that could really use a fraction of this support. The success of this movie proves we have real economic power to bend corporations to our will. Let's use this power to reshape America and the world.