Spike Lee said Black Panther changed the game, calling the 2018 Marvel hit the clearest sign yet that Hollywood’s old limits on Black filmmakers no longer held. In an interview with Screen Rant, Lee said the film moved the goal line again after each new success from a Black director.
Lee pointed to the industry’s long-running argument that Black films could not make money overseas, then to the next excuse that such movies needed stars to travel. Black Panther, he noted, had none of that in the way before release. Directed by Ryan Coogler, the film starred Chadwick Boseman as the titular hero and King of Wakanda, with Michael B. Jordan as a ruthless usurper, and went on to gross $1.35 billion worldwide.
That performance did more than beat expectations. The film broke the record for a movie with a Black director, a majority Black cast, Afrofuturist visuals and a story that folded slavery and civil rights into a superhero blockbuster. By the time the dust settled, it had become one of the most culturally relevant blockbusters ever made, and one of the clearest rebuttals to the old rules Lee has spent years challenging.
Lee has long argued that those rules were never about money alone. He has repeatedly said Malcolm X would not be made today because of the political climate, and he faced backlash years ago after asking outlets to send Black journalists to cover the film. The movie was also falsely reported to have banned Caucasian writers from reviewing it, a claim that lingered far longer than the facts did.
For Lee, the point is now plain: Hollywood’s excuses keep changing, but the pressure Black filmmakers create keeps changing the business with them. He released his first film, She’s Gotta Have It, in 1986, and nearly 40 years later he is still describing the same industry — only with a much higher bar set by what Black Panther proved was possible.
