As the yacht lights twinkled in the harbor and the audience sunk into their beach chairs on the sand, Ryan Coogler took the stage to introduce a screening of his most recent film, Black Panther, on the beach at the Cannes Film Festival Wednesday night. “L’auteur! L’auteur!” a group of French children began shouting.
When Coogler came to Cannes in 2009 with a short film playing in the American Pavilion, it was the first time the Oakland, California-born filmmaker had traveled outside of the United States. Now he was returning to Europe’s temple of cinema as the director of a movie that has made $1.3 billion at the global box office, earned near-universal praise from critics, and obliterated a pernicious Hollywood myth—that international audiences won’t show up for movies with predominantly black casts.
“Seeing all you guys is really blowing me away,” Coogler told the crowd, a significantly younger and less white group than the audiences for the well-publicized gala screenings that unfold down the Croisette at Cannes’s Grand Théâtre Lumière. “I think it’s the coolest way the film has ever been shown. It’s really heartwarming. My first time coming to this festival . . . I would look out at the water, walk around to see everybody dressed up in their tuxedos. But I actually spent a lot of time out here on the beach, watching the films that played for free. It really is coming full circle for me, to be back in front of you guys with this film that means so much.”
Black Panther is the latest and largest film with black actors in lead roles to draw a substantial portion of its box office from international ticket sales. In the last 18 months, Get Out, Hidden Figures, and Moonlight, all best-picture nominees, and in Moonlight’s case, a best-picture winner, have been hits abroad. “We’ve made a lot of progress in the last couple of years in the industry,” former Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs said in an interview. “People are not being blinded by gender or race or nationality, and it shows.”
That progress has come in part thanks to the international buyers and sellers of films who are working the marketplace at Cannes this week, such as Sinae Kim, managing director of South Korean distributor AUD. In 2016, after seeing Moonlight at the Toronto Film Festival, “I fell in love,” Kim said during a coffee break in between meetings at Cannes. “It’s like when you find a really good boyfriend, like a crush. It was big-time for me. I thought young people would understand it. I shared the trailer with my friends and my team and they said, ‘No, because it’s black, gay, poor, drugs. Nobody would be interested in the film in Korea. You can try but you have to understand, it’s going to be really difficult.’”
Kim decided to give it a shot, but first had to connect with Moonlight’s studio, A24, then a newcomer without an international presence, or a booth at Toronto for prospective buyers to visit. “It was really hard to find them,” Kim said. “I e-mailed 10 times. I told them, ‘I’m the one who can release the film really well in Korea.’ Eventually they e-mailed me back and said, ‘Can you wait a bit more?’”
AUD ultimately purchased Moonlight and opened the film a week before the Oscars; it went on to earn $1.3 million in South Korea, more than tripling Kim’s projections from Toronto. Bucking the tradition of foreign distributors who tailor American marketing campaigns to their countries, she relied on A24’s trailer and evocative posters of blue-lit beach scenes featuring Mahershala Ali and Alex Hibbert. “If they feel like a movie is not connected to the Korean market, they don’t talk about the story line that much,” Kim said of how Korean distributors traditionally handle a movie like Moonlight. “They show the motherhood story, maybe. But you can’t lie to the audience. If you like the poster, you will fall in love with the film. Otherwise you don’t go to the cinema.”
The success of these films has been across various genres, from the comic-book movie (Black Panther) to the art-house favorite (Moonlight) to the feel-good true-life tale (Hidden Figures) to horror. Jordan Peele’s Get Out earned nearly $79 million of its $255 million worldwide box office abroad. “How do you know something doesn’t work if you’re not trying it?” said Get Out producer Sean McKittrick, who is attending Cannes this week on behalf of his next film, the most prominent American movie screening in competition here: Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman. “How do you know films that star diverse casts don’t travel if they don’t exist? It was a misperception that people assumed was reality. The truth is that worldwide audiences see original, good movies. Originality and quality will always travel.”
