10 Fascinating Facts About Black Panther (2018)

While the MCU version of Black Panther didn’t properly debut until Captain America: Civil War in 2016, the character very nearly made it to the big screen long before that. All the way back in 1992, Wesley Snipes was doing everything he could to star in a Black Panther film.

Though he had Stan Lee’s blessing and Marvel’s full support, it was quite the struggle for Snipes. This was an era in which Marvel was practically bankrupt and thus needed to farm out films such as this to bigger production companies, so Snipes had his hands full trying desperately to convince one of the big studios to take on the project. Unfortunately, they all had a hard time differentiating the character from the 1960s civil rights revolutionary group of the same name, leading to lots of confusion and miscommunication about what exactly Snipes was trying to get made.

Even after he had gotten them to listen to what the film actually was, he still faced hardships. Columbia took the film on but wanted to move it from Wakanda to civil rights-era America so as to save money and keep the story grounded. Snipes disagreed completely, later saying;

“Black Panther is an iconic character who much of the world was unfamiliar with and the communities that I grew up in would love. Look, from the days of William Marshall playing Blacula in the 1970s black flicks and the fervor you found inside the black and Hispanic communities, it never crossed my mind that the audience wouldn’t be down with it."