With Thor: Ragnarok now playing in theaters across the globe, Marvel’s hard-wired marketing machine is beginning to turn its attention toward Wakanda, the fictional utopia in which Black Panther largely takes place.
And so, on the heels of yesterday’s gorgeous character posters – seriously, you might wanna reserve a nice black frame and a place on your bedroom wall for Marvel’s latest one-sheets – CBM has spotted the official Black Panther theater standee out in the wild.
Truth be told, most of these Black Panther portraits are lifted from previous media dumps, but if there’s one thing that’s worth discussing, it’s T’Challa’s sleek, purple-tinged suit of armor. It’s a much more streamlined version of the one introduced in Captain America: Civil War, which is no surprise when you consider that Chadwick Boseman’s would-be king will be locking horns with Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), who begins to stake a claim to the Wakanda throne.
Equipped with the so-called “Golden Jaguar” suit, Killmonger will be a difficult opponent for T’Challa to face, and though we’ve seen countless Marvel movies that pit their lead heroes against evil doppelgängers (see: Iron Man and Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man), we’re willing to give Black Panther the benefit of the doubt…for now.
Directed by Ryan Coogler, who shot to fame through Fruitvale Station and 2015’s Rocky spinoff, Creed, Black Panther is also the first Marvel movie to be anchored by a predominantly African-American cast. Indeed, Andy Serkis (Ulysses Klaw) and Martin Freeman (Everett Ross) are the only two notable white stars – they’re the Tolkien white guys, as one Reddit user so aptly put.
It’s primed to become the final Marvel solo movie before Infinity War – the event movie to end all event movies – and Ryan Coogler and his team will cordially invite us to Wakanda when Black Panther hits theaters on February 16th, 2018. We’ve also included those aforementioned character posters below for you to peruse, just in case you missed yesterday’s grand reveal.
