‘Black Panther’ Executive Producer Nate Moore Teases...

From the initial success of Iron Man in 2008, Marvel films have redefined what it means to make a superhero movie. From super soldiers to science experiments, Norse gods, Avengers, Defenders, and genetically modified raccoons—we’re way beyond blockbusters and trilogies. Try an entire Universe of stories; namely, the “Marvel Cinematic Universe,” which has grown to include fifteen films, six television shows, and dozens of overlapping heroes, all launched in less than a decade. And with a worldwide gross in excess of $11 billion dollars, Marvel Studios has rewritten the Hollywood handbook for action movies of the modern era. Their success with building a shared universe even has their longtime comic competitor DC struggling to keep up. Marvel still leads by a mile—and come next February when Black Panther arrives in theaters, the studio will break new ground again.

Black Panther is the first movie to star the first mainstream black superhero in comics and the first Marvel film to feature a predominantly black cast, with veteran talent including Forest Whitaker, Angela Bassett, John Kani, Phylicia Rashad, and numerous others. First created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966, Black Panther is a character with big screen plans in development dating back to the early 1990s. In the present day, where nominees for the Oscars are mostly (or literally all) white, and superhero movies are mostly (or nearly all) headlined by white guys named Chris, the time for films like Black Panther is long overdue.