Director Kobi Libii and actor Justice Smith’s The American Society of Magical Negroes from Focus Features bombed at the box office in its debut weekend only grossing $1.25 million.
Justice Smith as Aren in The American Society of Magical Negroes (2024), Focus Features
The-Numbers reports the film only grossed $1.25 million this past weekend after it screened in 1,147 theaters. Its per theater gross was a meager $1,090.
Not only did the film perform exceptionally poorly at the box office, critics and moviegoers who saw the film panned it.
Justice Smith as Aren in The American Society of Magical Negroes (2024), Focus Features
On Rotten Tomatoes the film has a rotten 30% rating from critics on the Tomatometer. It received an average rating of 5 out of 10 with 15 fresh reviews and 35 rotten reviews.
The Top Critics score is even worse with a 19% rotten rating. The average rating is 4.7 out of 10 with only 3 fresh reviews and 13 rotten reviews.
On the audience side, there’s seemingly less than a total of 100 reviews with the current verified audience score sitting at 65% with the average rating being a 3.5 out of 5. The All Audience score currently sits at 28% with an average rating of 1.9 out of 5.
The American Society of Magical Negroes Rotten Tomatoes scores
On Metacritic the film has a 52 Metascore from 18 critics. There are 5 positive reviews, 11 mixed reviews, and 2 negative reviews.
The User score sits at .5. There are 2 positive reviews and 39 negative reviews.
The American Society of Magical Negroes Metacritic scores
On IMDb the film has a 2.7 out of 10 from users with the majority (74.8%) rating the film a 1 out of 10.
The American Society of Magical Negroes IMDb score
The reviews and poor box office are not surprising. The film’s trailer marketed itself as racist.
The first trailer sees Justice Smith’s character Aren “feeling the discomfort” of white people. A character played by David Alan Grier even states, “Watching you walk through a room full of white people is the most painful thing I’ve ever seen.”
At one point during the trailer, Grier’s character asks, “What’s the most dangerous animal on the planet?” When Aren responds, “Shark.” Grier’s character retorts, “White people when they feel uncomfortable.”
He continues, “White people feeling uncomfortable precedes a lot of bad stuff for us. That’s why we fight white discomfort every day because the happier they are, the safer we are.”
Justice Smith and David Alan Grier in The American Society of Magical Negroes (2024), Focus Features
The film’s director Kobi Libii also made it abundantly clear the entire goal of the film was to lecture people and use it as a bludgeon to achieve political power.
He told NBC News, “This conversation around the expectation that black people are prioritizing white comfort over our own history and our own sense of self is an incredibly contemporary problem.”
“That’s happening politically in America right now. You see these laws being passed in places like Florida around what Black history is taught that are literally saying that elements of Black history, things that really happened in America, cannot be said out loud in the classroom if it makes white kids uncomfortable,” Libii said.
A scene from The American Society of Magical Negroes (2024), Focus Features The American Society of Magical Negroes (2024), Focus Features
He reiterated this in an interview with The Philadelphia Sunday Sun where he first shared his thoughts on the magical negro trope, “I think the magical negro is a stock character, a recurring character that typically white writers have employed across movies and literary history. It is a black character who only exists to support the white lead. They don’t really have their own internal life, they’re not really a three-dimensional person. The black best friend, the wise old man who comes in with a sprinkle of advice for the white hero just at the perfect moment. The reason that it’s important as a troubling trope to me, is because it quietly says black lives don’t matter. It quietly says black people belong in the background and white people belong in the foreground. The hero of the story is a white person and a black person only matters as much as they’re adding value to a white person’s story.”
Libii then declared, “The film is an attack on this trope, and also is an attack on that theme in American life. Who gets to be the center of American life? Whose lives matter and whose lives require marches, movements and real effort to protect? That dichotomy is all there in the trope. Part of what I’m interested in writing about is how racism works now. There are so many important historical stories about slavery, segregation and racism in America’s past, that sometimes centering those stories can contribute to the suggestion that it’s over or that we’ve solved it. But we haven’t solved it, it has just changed how it has been showing up. It’s showing up in these insidious ways — in technology, in unconscious biases.”
“It’s not that there’s a literal second system for Black people the way that there was in the 50s, but the outcomes are still really real. Part of my job as a Black filmmaker is to try to make that difficult to pin down, insidious quality of racism tangible and visible for audiences,” he asserted.
A scene from The American Society of Magical Negroes (2024), Focus Features The American Society of Magical Negroes (2024), Focus Features
What do you make of The American Society of Magical Negroes bombing at the box office?
Ha ha ha! Merry Christmas! Probably going to pass on this one. Being white and all.
Attempting to watch hopefully entertaining cinema, while white.
Not necessarily a good approach to capturing the hearts and minds of as many possible audience members as possible.
FYI, Caucasians are among the worlds least populace minority groups, and falling.