Black Panther arrives on Disney+ this morning, which means… well, it doesn’t mean much. The film has been on Netflix for around 1.5 years, which is why it wasn’t a launch title when the Disney streaming service debuted last November. It has been just over two years since Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole’s genre-hopping action drama took the worldwide box office by storm. In terms of legs, total gross and the ability to steamroll the competition, Black Panther was the modern-day equivalent to James Cameron’s Titanic, ironically arriving 20 years after the Winslet/DiCaprio romance sailed to $600 million domestic and $1.8 billion worldwide. The Chadwick Boseman/Michael B. Jordan actioner shares one grim attribute with the period-piece tragedy: Its lessons didn’t quite take. For Titanic, it was because Hollywood didn’t listen. For Black Panther, it was because the lessons of its $700 million domestic/$1.346 billion gross came too late.
In the years after Titanic, we didn’t see a comparative upswing in female-led romantic melodramas. Sure, Disney successfully emphasized the Ben Affleck/Liv Tyler romance in the second trailer and later TV spots for Armageddon ($201 million domestic/$553 million worldwide), and Sony made sure to add a melodramatic love song to the end credits for The Mask of Zorro ($94 million/$250 million), but otherwise it was mostly business as usual. Comparatively, The Matrix, which earned “just” $171 million domestic and “just” $465 million worldwide 16 months later, unleashed a wave of stylistic copycats (Charlie’s Angels) and genre-specific wannabees (Equilibrium). The closest thing to a Titanic copycat was Michael Bay’s critically-panned but $449 million-grossing Pearl Harbor in the summer of 2001. Sure, the specifics of Titanic may have been hard to mimic, but you’d think we’d at least see a few more big-budget melodramas.
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