Nia DaCosta's Candyman, the much-anticipated sequel to the 1992 horror favorite, has become the first movie directed by a black woman to be no. 1 at the box office.
Candyman ended its opening weekend with a $20.4 million gross. The film had the second-highest grossing opening weekend for a film directed by a black woman -- the first being Ava DuVernay's A Wrinkle in Time in 2018. Wrinkle earned $33.1 million in its opening weekend but was beaten for the top spot by Black Panther in its fourth week in theaters. DuVernay is also notable for being the first black woman to helm a production for a major Hollywood studio with a budget higher than $100 million.
In a featurette released on Juneteenth, DaCosta discussed how she began working on Candyman in the winter of 2019 and that working on it through the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 reflected the themes she was striving for in the film. "Throughout the making of the film," she said. "The thing I always came back to was the truth of the pain that was at the center of the story of Candyman. In the real-world, we create monsters of men all the time. People are murdered, they become either saints or they're vilified. And so, throughout the last year and a half, it was always coming back to that truth."
Candyman was written by Jordan Peele and follows visual artist Anthony McCoy and his girlfriend, art gallery director Brianna Cartwright. After hearing an urban legend surrounding Helen Lyle (of the 1992 film), McCoy ventures out searching for inspiration and is introduced to the story of Candyman. His attempts to bring attention to the story through art results in the myth himself arising, spelling doom for everyone around McCoy.
Candyman opened to positive reviews, with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 85 percent at the time of writing. CBR's own Kiara Halls said in her review "Candyman expands the lore in a simple way that's not just effective, but truly horrifying in how heartbreaking it is. It's difficult to discuss the film without revealing the twist, but it's an expansion to the mythos that's downright beautiful. It not only paves the way for a renewed Candyman franchise, one firmly set in Black hands, but it also comments on inter-generational trauma as a cultural force, rather than hereditary."
Source: Deadline