That choice, call it the Killmonger Precedent, paid off handsomely. It made Michael B. Jordan’s Erik Killmonger one of the MCU’s most iconic bad guys (the first proper Black villain of the MCU since Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Karl Mordo in “Doctor Strange” in 2016 was not the film’s antagonist) and elevated the film from being merely an entertainment or box checked toward Marvel’s diversity bona fides; even those who objected to the villainization of someone driven by values of Black Liberation (and they were many) had to on some level admit that the discourse around Killmonger is what made “Black Panther” work. If Andy Serkis’ Ulysses Klaue had been the bad guy, the film would have been cleaner, simpler, and there would not be much to argue about. Having a Black villain, espousing his ideology, gave Marvel a sense of being “important.”
Last year represents a curious milestone for the MCU where race is concerned: every villain in every 2023 film or series was Black (with the exception of the second season of their animated series "What If…"). When I’ve pointed that out to people, the response is usually, “how did that happen?” But for me there are bigger questions this raises.
The goal of increased representation for Black characters in American film has historically been about combating negative, stereotypical depictions and replacing them with more three-dimensional and positive characters. Sixty years ago, the push for these kinds of characters that represented the best aspects of humanity was an understandable reaction to being restricted to being comic relief, the help, buffoons, or worse. But inevitably, once those trails have been blazed the time comes for a different kind of representation.
Context is everything, and there’s a world of difference between Jonathan Majors being asked to play a genocidal maniac now and Sidney Poitier being offered a similar part in 1962. In fact, I have heard many Black actors suggest that in some ways being able to play all of the spectrum of humanity, the heroic, the villainous, and everything in between is the best outcome of any campaign towards increasing on-screen diversity; so long, of course as those villainous portrayals steer clear of old stereotypes. So the fact that Marvel gave us a year of all Black villains is not in and of itself a bad thing nor a good thing. But it does, for me at least, make me wonder what this occurrence tells us about the contemporary depiction of race in film.