Black Panther has just proved that a superhero movie starring an almost entirely black cast can make a ton of money all around the world.
Marvel's parent company Disney will almost certainly want more diversity in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, because at the end of the day the color that matters most is green (though not the Hulk's green). Inevitably, they will turn to the source material, i.e. the comic book universe, look at what they've got by way of "person-of-color" superheroes, and they'll realize that apart from the guys they've either already put in the movies as sidekicks/peripheral characters or relegated to their television universe (Falcon, War Machine, Luke Cage, Deathlok, Alex Wilder, Nico Minoru, Bill Foster, Misty Knight), they have precious little by way of characters who are persons of color.
Off the top of my head, the only fairly prominent, as-yet unused characters of color I could think of are Rage (whose story is sort of like a superhero version of the Tom Hanks movie Big, but with toxic waste and urban violence), Monica Rambeau (who I think is appearing in next year's Captain Marvel movie), Shang Chi (who, if I'm not mistaken, was created following the whole Bruce Lee craze), Australian Aborigine Manifold (an interesting prospect for a film, if I'm honest) and 3-D man (who is probably best forgotten). Of course, the black X-men like Storm and Bishop are off the table until Disney's deal with Fox is done, and besides, they've already appeared on film, as peripheral characters.
Sure, the once-controversial black Spider-Man, Miles Morales, has his very own animated movie coming out later this year, and hooray for that, but really, the breakout success of Black Panther only highlights how few non-white superheroes there are, not just on the big screen, but in the comics from which they came.
To their credit, Marvel spent the better part of the 2010s trying to rectify this disparity by introducing not only the aforementioned Spider-Man, but a Pakistani-American Ms. Marvel in Kamala Khan, a Latin-American Nova in Sam Alexander, and a Korean American Hulk in Amadeus Cho, but they were basically raked over hot coals by (presumably) right-wing fans for their "PC brigade" or "SJW" characters. A bigger problem, to my mind, was that rather than create all new characters with new origins and powers, Marvel basically slotted persons of color into known superhero identities, which felt like lazy pandering at its worst. And don't even get me started on Marvel's attempts to pander to LGBT readers by retroactively making the X-Man Iceman gay after he was straight for over fifty years in print. Don't get me wrong; I collected most of Miles Morales' Spider-Man issues before he was integrated into the "616" Marvel Universe and I still pick up Ms. Marvel trade paperbacks, but as far as ORIGINAL POC characters is concerned, Marvel's lineup remains to be severely wanting. Oh, and despite the fact that some of the most illustrious comic book creators of the last several years hail from the Philippines, there isn't a single active Filipino Marvel superhero to date. There was one team, the Triumph division, that appeared briefly in the pages of Invincible Iron Man back in 2008, who were unfortunately blown to pieces by Ezekiel Stane's disciples. They didn't even last a whole issue.
For me the last truly original, interesting minority characters introduced into the Marvel Universe were Nico Minoru, Alex Wilder and Victor Mancha in the Runaways book. Two out of three of them have already appeared on Hulu's Runaways TV series, and while Victor's eventual appearance there is probably a foregone conclusion, I really wouldn't mind if Kevin Feige made the move to bump him up to the MCU. Maybe they could retcon his creation into the MCU canon by saying that, on the way to Korea, Ultron experimented a little bit in Mexico (given that, in the comics, Mancha really is a creation of Ultron made from his own mechanical design and spliced with the DNA of his human mother). Recently, Mark Waid and Humberto Ramos introduced an interesting Latin American character, The Red Locust, in the pages of their Champions book, so maybe there's some promise yet.
I suppose a prime candidate for a film adaptation is Sam Alexander's Nova, considering that the original Nova of the comics, Richard Rider, is a fairly generic white dude whose origin story is uncomfortably similar to that of Green Lantern. Also, Sam's story of his father disappearing into space is the stuff of some pretty good drama. I don't know how they'd work that out considering that the Nova Corps has already been introduced, and none of them fly around thanks to magical helmets, but I'm sure Marvel could figure something out if they wanted to.
I hope Marvel the publisher's takeaway from the runaway success of Black Panther is that audiences will voraciously consume product regardless of the skin color of the protagonists, for as long as the stories are good.
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