Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has been around for a few of days now and, as with every time a new MCU movie comes around, fans are divided.
Presented as the movie that should close phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it costed Marvel $250 million to produce and has so far made $330 million at the box office. But is it worth the hype?
Let’s start by saying that Marvel is famous for all the references from previous movies that they include in each new one. Fans and non-fans alike have been complaining that, even if the consistent references are a distinctive mark for Marvel, it has felt excessive lately, making it impossible to follow a movie or a series without watching the previous ones. And that would be fine if they were about 3 or 4 movies, but they’re not. It’s 29 movies and 8 tv series we're talking about. Not to mention the fact that most of them (at least the entirety of the series and a lot of the movies) are exclusively streamed by Disney+, which you need to pay a fairly expensive subscription for.
As noted before, this is the closing movie of phase 4, and in fairness, to be a movie that should be closing an entire phase, it’s not having as much success. Matter of fact, closing phase 3 was Spider-Man: Far From Home, which could easily be considered an epilogue to Avengers: Endgame. And I think everybody remembers how much of an influence that movie had not only on the MCU but on the movie industry generally. It’s clear to see that Black Panther: Wakanda Forever isn’t having the same impact.
Now, this could be because the main character of Black Panther (2018) is not even there (Chadwick Boseman, who took on the role of T’Challa in the first movie, died of cancer 2 years ago). The director and co-writer Ryan Coogler himself admitted that this sequel was being written specifically to bring Boseman back on the screen at first. But given the unexpected death of the actor, the sequel focuses on T’Challa’s sister instead, Shuri, portrayed by Letitia Wright. The plot has therefore been significantly stretched to fit the real-life situation concerning the actor, and the question that naturally comes along is “Is the whole movie a useless stretch just to make Marvel earn more?”.
Well, yes and no. The movie opens up some material for phase 5 and even phase 6 (it leaves some questions that are probably going to be solved in Avengers: Secret Wars, planned for 2026). At the same time, it can’t be denied that we got only a couple of new pieces of information, all of which could’ve easily been summed up in some other, previous tv series. We can easily notice the tendency that Marvel has had lately of stretching plots into more than one movie or show just to put a few new concepts on the table. There is no comparison between the density of information given in the movies of the first 3 phases and what’s being given now.
So even if fans are happy when a new series is announced, and everyone in the fandom is lining up in theatres to see this movie, some of them are getting tired of it. Many audiences would rather skip to some more content-filled projects instead of all this cross-over. And I don’t blame them. Before the franchise sinks in its very own universe, making it impossible for new fans to approach its products and for old ones to ignore the repetitive pattern of the movies, it should take an example from T’Challa himself and let go of its own closed, fan-exclusive cinematic universe—opening up its borders to the whole world, just like the former king of Wakanda did with his country in the original Black Panther.
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