‘Candyman’ director Nia DaCosta has been tapped to direct Marvel’s sequel to ‘Captain Marvel’.
The original film was released in March 2019 and grossed $1.13 billion worldwide.
There is some speculation that DaCosta’s new gig will likely break the record of a Black female director’s largest-ever movie budget. Ava DuVernay currently holds the record for the Disney movie, A Wrinkle in Time, which came in at $115 million budget.
The first ‘Captain Marvel’ movie had a budget of $152 million.
DaCosta became a Hollywood director to watch with her debut feature Little Woods, which starred Tessa Thompson, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2018.
The film had a mostly female-led crew. She talked to DAZED about the impact the team had on the project:
“I feel like it was a very positive effect. I can’t quantify exactly what it is, and if I did, I might sound a bit trite, like ‘there was so much more empathy,’ or whatever – things like that would be wrong to say,” she explained. “But at the same time, I think having mostly women on a movie like this was really helpful for creating a space that felt safe, not from violence necessarily, but safe from the male gaze. Not just a sexual way, but in terms of like… a doubting sort of gaze. So that was really useful. We did have men on the crew, but most of our department heads were women, and our producers were all women.
DaCosta went on to pen ‘Candyman’ alongside with Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld. The film was slated to hit theaters on June 12 but was delayed until Oct. 16 due to the global pandemic.
“I just want to tell good stories in ways that will shine light on lives rarely seen on screen, because stories can push humanity forward,” she told Indie Wire last year. “And so I think a diversity of stories is really important in raising awareness and creating empathy. It’s through this medium of film that many of us learn about and communicate with one another, especially with people we don’t know.”
