Marvel boss Kevin Feige hints at what a Black Panther Oscar campaign might look like

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.

The similarly buzzy Wonder Woman, for instance, scored only a 92 on Rotten Tomatoes and a 76 on Metacritic — good numbers, but not the sort of rarified air Black Panther breathes. (Infinity War, meanwhile, scored an 83 on Rotten Tomatoes and a 68 on Metacritic.)

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.

I’ve written before about the potential for the film to become a hit with the Academy Awards, but doing so will require somebody at Marvel Studios or its parent company, Disney, to open up the pocketbook and spend on an Oscar campaign. So at a recent press event for Marvel’s upcoming Ant-Man and the Wasp, I asked Marvel’s head producer Kevin Feige if an Oscar campaign might be in the offing.

He was characteristically cagey (Feige never met a question he couldn’t deflect), but I detected a hint of a strategy going forward. Here’s what he told me:

I think there are a lot of amazing artists that helped to make that movie, and it would be wonderful if they could be recognized. Almost everyone involved in that movie, bringing that movie together, is great, and it would be wonderful to see if they’re recognized. We’ll see. This genre, typically not.

And I think it would be a wonderful thing for Panther and for our production designer Hannah [Beachler], and our costume designer Ruth [Carter], and for Ryan [Coogler] who co-wrote the script with Joe Robert Cole, and of course directed the movie. And Michael B. Jordan, and Chadwick [Boseman] and Lupita [Nyong’o] and Letitia [Wright].

There’s amazing performances, amazing artistry in that. I’d love to see them recognized, and I’d love to see this genre recognized. Yes, they’re visual effects, yes, they are fun explosions, yes, there are spaceships. But these are all hand-crafted. Maybe it’s in front of a computer; it’s often actual sets, actual hand-built costumes. As much passion and artistry and talent goes into every single one we do; it’d be amazing for them to be recognized.

Feige’s answer suggests a two-pronged approach to garnering Oscar nominations. The first is playing off the historical nature of a superhero movie getting into the Best Picture category at the Oscars, something that has never happened before. Yes, 2008’s The Dark Knight surely came close, with eight nominations, but it was unable to crack the top category. (The outrage over both it and Wall-E being snubbed led to the Academy expanding the Best Picture category to up to 10 nominees.)

Since superhero movies remain the dominant box office monolith of the 21st century, acknowledging a high-quality one with some top Oscar nominations could be a good way for the Academy to acknowledge the genre that pays the bills.

But Feige’s answer also points to the way this movie could become an Oscar juggernaut. See, in the Academy, individual “branches” recognize their particular categories. So the costume designers vote for the five costume design nominees, the actors vote for the acting nominees, and so on, with everybody in the Academy voting to nominate for Best Picture.

Black Panther’s best bet against more traditional awards players is to become such a sensation in the below-the-line categories that it gets swept to a Best Picture nomination alongside those nominations, because all of the visual effects folks and the sound designers and so on are casting their Best Picture vote for it, too. (And singling out how the sets and costumes were “hand-built” also indicates Feige is already thinking about how different approaches have to be taken to woo different branches.)

It’s not as if the film doesn’t have a prayer in the other top categories. Coogler is a sensational young talent who could well get a nomination for his directing or screenplay for Panther, while Michael B. Jordan plays the kind of instantly iconic character who could crack the supporting race.

But talking about Black Panther as a celebration of film craftsmanship across the board would be a nod toward a different, unexpected Oscar juggernaut that pursued a similar strategy and went on to win many, many awards — the Lord of the Rings trilogy. If Panther can replicate that success, more traditional awards players might have to look out.