The Marvel movie opened in 70 percent of foreign territories the same weekend as its US opening (and it has yet to debut in some of the biggest global markets, including China, Japan, and Russia, where it will open the film in coming weeks) and made a whopping $169 million abroad.Ĭombined with its US ticket sales, that’s more than $400 million over the Presidents Day weekend, putting Black Panther’s launch among the biggest four-day opening weekends of all time, just behind Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.Īnd yet, the estimates were much lower. In 2016, Hidden Figures, about three black women NASA scientists in the 1960s, made $165.5 million in the US and an additional $48.8 million overseas.Īnd Moonlight, the coming-of-age art film with an almost entirely black cast that eventually won Best Picture for that year, actually wound up making more money abroad than in the US - upward of $37 million of its eventual $65 million total box office gross came from the international box office.īlack Panther is a joyous game changer for Marvelīut projections for Black Panther still underestimated how well it would do abroad. The 2015 film Straight Outta Compton, about N.W.A., was a hit not just domestically (where it brought in about $161 million) but also abroad (more than $40 million). There are plenty of examples of “black films” - movies telling stories about black people, with black actors in the lead roles - that did just fine overseas, from Blade and Bad Boys to Ray and Creed. The “black films don’t travel” myth has been disproved before. But it persists, not just in the expectations that movie studio executives set for “black films,” but also in what they’re willing to invest in those films.īlack Panther, though, may have changed the game. You’d think the myth - which suggests that movies telling stories about black people, with black actors in the lead roles, aren’t interesting to many people outside of North America - would have died by now. It may, finally, crush a pernicious Hollywood myth: that “black films don’t travel.” Black Panther didn’t just obliterate box office records with its massive opening weekend.

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