As much as I give shit to companies that blatantly target demographics, there is still some merit as to what's being done here.
Majority Black casts in movies are almost always regulated to non-Box Office movies, the bar's so low that a lot of Tyler Perry's recycled and hackneyed shit is considered decent because it at least tries to represent and cater to an underrepresented group of people.
This is a movie coming out from a company that has been putting out decent movies and it's already projecting to be one of the highest takers in the BO. It's something to celebrate when you consider that this shit simply doesn't exist. Even in Star Wars etc. a lot of the minority characters are regulated to people that mean nothing to the plot. Finn feels like such a piece of shit in TFA, and in TLJ he's a bitchboy that accomplishes nothing and goes off with the other token minority to briefly touch on class differences.
There's a lot of genuine hype around this movie for good reason imho.
Sure, it's an entirely black cast. I understand why black people are celebrating. They have good reason to do so. But why does that translate into hype for other people who aren't black? This is nice, but it isn't relevant to asians or latinos, middle easterners or Pacific Islanders. It feels like you're making the mistake of lumping all non-white people together under the banner of 'minority' and saying they should be excited for this too... but the cold, hard reality is that an all black cast in a blockbuster budget movie is pretty much as irrelevant to their day-to-day lives as it is to white people. I don't think that's really attributable to the hype it's getting from all corners, except for where it gets into this divisive black vs white tribalism that we've been discussing for the last few years.
I'm not being completely obtuse here – I do get it. It is a nice milestone in some respects and I get why people would want to celebrate it. Still, I feel like the viral marketing going on here is transparently obvious that it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
That being said –
The thing that is mainly driving people to see Black Panther seems to be much more heavily focused on this narrative of 'seeing this movie will make a positive social impact!'
While there's a lot of media coverage of the "this is great for black folks" angle, I imagine the vast majority of people are being "driven" to see the movie because it's a highly rated movie in a series of very popular films.
This is also a part of it. I think it's fair to say there is a guaranteed rate of success for any Marvel movie at this point – probably with Ant Man or Dr. Strange being the baseline – and anything on top of that is a combination of hype, word of mouth, marketing, etc. This movie was going to be a success regardless of whether or not it became politicized.
