Back when the first footage for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy rolled out, somebody tweeted, in a nutshell, that then-recent remarks made by Mark Pedowicz of The CW–suggesting that Wonder Woman was a challenging character to adapt–were preposterous because Marvel Studios was making a movie with a talking raccoon.The tweet was funny, and it got re-shared hundreds of times. It crossed through my Twitter and Facebook feed at least ten times, often with accompanying “hell yeah!” commentary from whoever shared it.And, of course, it was more or less nonsense. But it was entertaining nonsense and certainly wasn’t hurting anybody.
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As for “Black Panther,” he noted that T’Challa “has a lot of the same characteristics of a Captain America: great character, good values.” But the movie might be difficult to pull off, he said, because of having to create Wakanda from the ground up. “It’s always easier basing it here. For instance, ‘Iron Man 3′ is rooted right here in Los Angeles and New York. When you bring in other worlds, you’re always faced with those difficulties.”
Both Marvel and Warners have said that their black and female characters, respectively, are hard to get right, and that getting them wrong would be worse than not doing them. And here’s the thing: they’re right.Not because they should be dragging their feet on developing these characters–but recent experience suggests that they aren’t. They’re right because getting these particular characters wrong would be far worse than just making a crappy Steel, Elektra or Jonah Hex movie.In the cases of both Black Panther and Wonder Woman, it isn’t about just a superhero that checks that box–it’s about the iconic superhero that represents an entire class of superhero characters in the eyes and minds of many fans.Particularly casual fans or non-comics-readers, who will have to make up much of the audience and whose enthusiasm for these projects is not as guaranteed as comic book fans’ is. After all, Michael B. Jordan hit the nail on the head this week when he said that critics upset about Fox having cast a black man as Johnny Storm in Fantastic Four will go see the movie anyway. He’s acknowledging that anyone who cares enough about the source material to complain about colorblind casting, also cares enough to go see it opening weekend…if only so they can complain about everything else they think the filmmakers got wrong.
