“Black Panther” Sets Marvel Pre-Sales Record

Marvel Studios’ “Black Panther” is still a month off, but ticket site Fandango is reporting that the Ryan Coogler-directed film has become the best-selling Marvel Cinematic Universe movie in terms of pre-sales after its first 24 hours.

The movie opened for advance ticket sales late Monday, and has already overtaken previous top-seller “Captain America: Civil War”. Additionally, IMAX has announced that select scenes from the film will be specially formatted for the big screen.

Coogler reportedly designed several sequences of the movie to fill more of the screen at an expanded IMAX 1.9:1 aspect ratio, providing viewers with 26% more image in IMAX. Speaking with Fandango, he says the film defies categorisation as its part espionage thriller, part family drama, part political drama all tied together by an overarching crime story. Asked about the influences, he says films like “A Prophet” and the Sean Connery-led James Bond films had a big impact:

“Definitely with James Bond. I think similar to Captain America: The Winter Soldier, we’re definitely influenced by the films of the ’70s and influenced by crime fiction. For me, I try to pull from a wide variety of films.

My favorite film is a film called A Prophet, a French film that was released almost a decade ago now, which seems a bit crazy. Anytime I’m making a movie, I’m always leaning on inspiration from that one. A Prophet deals with secret societies and cultural ties, so that was a big influence [on Black Panther].

I also watched a lot of Coppola’s work from the ’70s. We were looking at all of that stuff and also watched a lot of the James Bond films, but not the new ones. I wanted to watch the ones that were made in the ’60s and ”0s. I watched Goldfinger for the first time, and I just thought it was really interesting in terms of how James Bond was handy.”

“Black Panther” is currently slated for release on February 16th.

Source: Heat Vision