SOURCE: Variety | Clayton Davis
Studios didn’t exactly jump at the chance to make a movie about the late Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton.
“It knocked me on my ass,” admits Shaka King, the co-writer and director of “Judas and the Black Messiah,” the blistering new look at Hampton’s short life and enduring impact. “I was under the impression that if you make a movie about a Black Panther, produced by the director of ‘Black Panther,’ which made a billion dollars, starring two of the best actors of our generation, and you have a producer and co-financer in Charles King, who is willing to put up half the budget, it’s going to be a bidding war. That was not the case.”