As a presence in 2018’s “Black Panther,” I only found Everett Ross mildly annoying. Did I bristle when he dismissed Wakanda as a “third world country”? Of course. Did I smirk when he laid hands on T’Challa, prompting Okoye to plot his murder? Duh. But I came around! Mostly because I like laughing and he inspired lots of jokes at his expense. When he arrives on stretcher and Shuri looks him over with glee, she utters one of the movie’s funniest lines: “Great, another broken white boy for us to fix.” That’s great stuff! When she later nicknames him “colonizer,” it earned a hearty laugh from my theater.
There’s also something wonderfully ironic about flipping the script with a “token white guy.” Ross basically assumes the role that’s far too often given to people of color in these movies: playing second fiddle to the star. Except, in his case, it’s even funnier because he’s hilariously inessential. Ultimately it’s Shuri, Okoye, M’Baku, and Nakia who ensure T’Challa’s victory in “Black Panther.” And while it’s nice to have a guy on the inside in “Wakanda Forever,” the rogue CIA Agent is utterly unhelpful and needs Okoye to swoop in and rescue him by the movie’s end.
All this to say that we’ve had some good times, Everett Ross and I. Every time they release a lineup of character posters for a Black Panther movie where Freeman is the sole piece of wonder bread, it plays like a hilarious inside joke that only Marvel Studios is unaware of. But this walking gag has officially overstayed his welcome and if yeeting him out of the entire MCU isn’t an option, can we at least agree that he has no place in any future “Black Panther” movie?
