Both Michael B Jordan and Ryan Coogler are still living off the success from their film Black Panther that simply dominated the box office worldwide. Having worked together previously on Creed and Fruitvale Station the duo are by no means slowing down on teaming up for another motion picture.
Michael and Ryan recently chatted with Vulture on their plans to "tell stories in today, or in the future," with Michael adding, “or can we go back even further? There’s always one period that people want to go back to, but can we go back to Hannibal? Or Mansa Musa, destroying economies as he traveled? Can we go back to the Egyptians?”
The duo believes it's important to create films that properly depict Black culture, especially the contribution the Black community has made in history - such as Mansa Musa who was an influential African ruler in the fourteenth century.
“I used to get crushed when I was younger and would watch movies about young people,” Ryan told the publication. “And I’d be like, No — that’s not us. Or reading articles about the millennial generation — people making general statements about us. Again, no. Wrong. Just hire us, bruh. Hire me and let me work.”
Michael explains how most current films are not written by Black people, adding “so if [most writers’] only interaction with someone who looks like me is from stereotypes, what you see on TV, then those are the types of roles that are going to keep getting written."
“Black art, it’s so complicated. Because there is no white art,” Ryan explains. “Because, whether people want to admit it or not, you know, in this country, in this culture, white is seen as the norm. Because there’s no need to identify it as anything, it’s looked at as standard. Which, if you compare and contrast that, there’s an inherent unfairness to it.”
Ryan and Michael are set to team up for Wrong Answer, the true story of an Atlanta teacher involved in a school test cheating scandal and the upcoming Creed 2.