I have a 9am screening of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” on 11.08.22. The embargo is said to lift a few minutes after the screening ends at noon.
‘Wakanda Forever’ is 2 hours 41 minutes. I can’t say I’m looking forward to it, I wasn’t a fan of the first film and the trailer for this sequel looked like CGI overload. Ryan Coogler is a talented director, but he should be concentrating his chops on original stories, not MCU claptrap.
This sequel has no Chadwick Boseman, no Michael B. Jordan, no Daniel Kaluuya. However, Coogler is back in the director’s chair. The marketing is heavily pushing Angela Bassett and Letitia Wright’s characters. Whether Wright and Bassett are enough of a draw to get asses in theater seats is left to be determined.
The result is that projections are already warning that ‘Wakanda Forever’ might make less than 40% the original’s $700 million gross. A highly unusual stat given that sequels tend to gross more than their predecessors, but the cards have indeed been stacked against this sequel with no Boseman, Kaluuya and Jordan.
A silver lining, if the sequel ends up getting great reviews, like the first one did, then it does stand a chance at nabbing quite a few Oscar nominations. A verdict will be rendered when “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” gets released on November 11th.