One of Hollywood’s first Black superheroes will appear on screen with the release of Black Panther in a few days.

Based on many indicators of strong audience interest, Black Panther should be a huge box office success.

This leads us to ask the inevitable question:

Why almost 10 years after the beginning of the comic book era of blockbuster movies, is Black Panther the first major studio release to star a Black superhero?

Within the past five years, Black film directors have had increasing box-office successes.

Some recent examples of successful films include Straight Outta Compton (2015), Moonlight (2016), Get Out (2017) and Girls Trip (2017).

This is moreover putting aside the Oscars recognition some of those films got.

Making these box-office successes all the more substantial is that these Black-led narrative films are made with what is considered small movie budgets. This is at least in part due in part to an executive-level reticence to invest in Black narratives.

Hollywood studios think they will maximize popularity and profits if they focus on the experience of the majority.

For them, the rationale for such a focus on white heterosexual people is obvious. Since the mainstream is the majority population, Hollywood producers are supposedly more likely to attract viewers into theatres if they emphasize identities, experiences, and beliefs with which people are already familiar.

Yet Black Panther is a mega-production with a budget of $200 million filled with Black talent on both sides of the camera.

Hopefully, this Hollywood mega-production steeped in a specific sense of Black thematics and esthetics will become one of the highest-grossing films of this year, thus showing the great error of limiting the budget of Black-led releases.

Will this potential success lead to a shift in Hollywood?

The American movie industry has already started reconsidering its attitude toward diversity.

The idea of developing a film franchise is not a guarantee of a box-office success anymore. Many experts blamed the “franchise fatigue” as the main reasons for the disappointing commercial returns of the last chapter of series such as Pirates of the Caribbean or Transformers.

To keep franchises profitable, producers are recently choosing to put forward new voices. New talents who can bring something different to the franchise.

We are seeing more and more examples of this sort. Two recent huge box-office successes from last year include Wonder Woman directed by Patty Jenkins ($821 million) and Thor Ragnarok directed by Taika Waititi ($852 million).

These two independent filmmakers (respectively a woman and a descent of Māori heritage) were able to keep an artistic vision within a rigid system of production.

This points to the ways major studios are willing to differentiate their offerings: new voices with a clear and personal vision that doesn’t fit the dominant model/pattern.

We need narrators to challenge the mainstream, to produce stories that do not replicate the same dominant model. In the end, this shift in Hollywood, which we hope will gain in momentum, represents good news for all of us.

A focus on the experience of the majority in popular culture leaves little room for other experiences to emerge as authentic or legitimate. Such other experiences include women, people of colour, differently abled and people from the LGBTQ community.

Their absence from popular culture or the lack of their three-dimensional complexity in their portrayal leads to a partial view of society.

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This skewed image of reality seen on the big screen may feed back into and shape real social relations, influence people’s mindsets or help legitimate prevailing assumptions about other people.

But thanks to more voices pushing for space in Hollywood, the U.S. film industry can look a little bit more like the North American reality.

Philippe Gauthier is an adjunct professor in film and popular culture at Queen's University and the University of Ottawa.