Diving deeper into the world of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

This quantitative study aims to further explore the black female portrayals in the superhero movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022). More specifically, it dives deeper into how female audiences engage with the female characters and looks for differences between participants of colour and white participants. Representation of females and minorities in movies is a topic that is still sensitive due to its great lack and stereotypical portrayals within the film industry. Audiences want to feel seen, represented and have characters that inspire them on a deeper level. The following research question is posed: To what extent does engagement with female characters in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever impact entertainment of a female audience? According to previous research, female and minority portrayals in blockbuster movies suffer from stereotypes (Pennell & Behm-Morawitz, 2015). This research uses several character engagement concepts like recognizability, wishful identification and parasocial relationships. Furthermore, it measures the perception of gender traits and perceived realism of the female characters among the participants. After building a theoretical framework around these concepts and explaining the relevance of the cultivation theory, hypotheses were created based on previous literature and certain expectations. A survey made on Qualtrics (N = 152) was distributed to gather data from female Marvel fans who were familiar with the female characters Shuri, Okoye, Nakia and Queen Ramonda. After data cleaning and preparation, the hypotheses were tested using the program SPSS. Several tests were conducted such as t-tests, one-way ANOVA’s and hierarchical regression analyses. Some hypotheses were accepted and other had to be rejected. Main findings included that female characters were considered to be both masculine and feminine which differed per character. Additionally, t-tests revealed that only differences in gender traits were found amongst the characters which shows a sign that all characters were perceived as real. However, there were no differences found for scores on, for example, wishful identification regarding participants of colour versus white participants, which is in contrast to previous research (Bui, 2017). The conclusions that black female characters become less stereotypical and are widely accepted among all kinds of audiences are drawn, which means that progress is being made in blockbuster movies regarding portrayals of females and minorities. The study concludes with a thorough discussion of the main findings, limitations, and suggestions for future research.