The movie is Marvel’s first black superhero film, starred a predominantly black cast and was directed by Ryan Coogler, Marvel’s first black director, but not everyone sees the film’s success as an industry breakthrough.
Rapper and business mogul, Sean Diddy Combs, appeared on Variety’s latest cover, and in his interview, he refers to Black Panther as a “cruel experiment.”
He says: “Black Panther was a cruel experiment because we live in 2018, and it’s the first time that the film industry gave us a fair playing field on a worldwide blockbuster, and the hundreds of millions it takes to make it.”
Diddy views Black Panther as a small baby step to inclusion than an outright game-changer. He told Variety that all industries have the same issue of letting black men and women hold top-level positions, even when black employees have been able to make their respective companies millions of dollars.
“For all the billions of dollars that these black executives have been able to make them, [there’s still hesitation] to put them in the top-level positions. They’ll go and they’ll recruit cats from overseas. It makes sense to give [executives of colour] a chance and embrace the evolution, instead of it being that we can only make it to president, senior VP. There’s no black CEO of a major record company. That’s just as bad as the fact that there are no [black] majority owners in the NFL. That’s what really motivates me.
Click here to read P. Diddy’s full interview.
Very true but at the same time it’s a step in the right direction… Yes should have been done sooner…but so should have voting for blacks etc..