Katt Williams To Make Films or More Foolishness

Comic-actor Katt Williams has the opportunity to assume the mantle of filmmaker in the vein of the first Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux producing commercially viable, culturally relevant, historically accurate films that leave a lasting legacy that Tyler Perry and 50 Cents eschew - preferring coin over culture. "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" was produced on a shoestring budget by Black filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles in 1971 for around $150k. "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" was released to limited distribution. It grossed $15,000,000 or $116,912,592.59 in today's dollars, demonstrating to Hollywood that Black themed films have a commercially viable market. 

Like Hip Hop music, however, the Hollywood elite, primarily wealthy, white Jewry, wrested creative control from artists with predatory contracts leaving a profane, polluted, cookie-cutter, follow-the-bouncing-ball bastard that denigrated Black women, glorified criminality, and promoted drug culture, in its wake we now know as Rap. These folks did the same with Van Peebles' idea creating a steady stream of low-budget Black-themed movies in the '70s historically known infamously as the Blaxploitation era. 

Spike Lee, John Singleton, F. Gary Gray and many, many other Black fledgling filmmakers have had to beg, plead, and cajole for funding to produce their work finding nothing but obstruction in the quest in opposition to movies Lee made like School Daze, Malcolm X, and Red Tails, which were commercial viable and historically significant, both. 

A moribund comic book publisher decided to dip its toe into cinema in 1998 by taking one of its Black anti-hero from the comic's pages to the big screen. The movie "Blade" starring Wesley Snipes was a commercial success grossing $70 million in the U.S. and $60.2 million worldwide for Marvel Comics. 

Twenty years later after a string of hits, a bona fide franchise gushing money, Marvel did it again with the Black Panther, which made $700 million, the highest domestic gross of 2018 and $1.3 billion worldwide. So, the presumption that Black creative (especially docs, biopics, and content) products lack an evolved, mature market is an implicitly racist, ignorant notion. And Katt Williams, who is a genius, has an opportunity to change the paradigm by producing documentaries, biopics, and dramas that span the black experience here in America or throughout the Diaspora.