Almost halfway through 2018, Marvel’s Black Panther remains one of the biggest successes of the year, both critically and commercially.
It’s under $250,000 away from becoming just the third movie to cross the $700 million mark at the box office in the US and Canada, which it should manage sometime in early July. (Yes, it’s still playing in some theaters, even though it’s out on home video.) While it will only be the No. 2 movie of the year internationally, it’s all but certain to be the top movie of the year domestically, having held off Avengers: Infinity War.
But the movie’s reviews have set it apart from the superhero pack. With a 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and (even more impressively) an 88 on Metacritic — which measures not just whether a critic liked a movie but how much that critic liked it — Black Panther can boast numbers better than most superhero films.
That’s even before we talk about the way Black Panther has become a cultural sensation, or the way it incorporates modern political arguments into the midst of what is otherwise a typical superhero tale. All of the above — but especially those reviews — marks Black Panther not just as a hit but as a potential Oscar player.
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