The Woman King TRIVIA

past weekend, I reviewed The Woman King for the Examiner and is a definite MUST SEE! And here are some interesting little tidbits I found for the film. And make sure to catch my full review of The Woman King on Wednesday!

• The film is based on the Kingdom of Dahomey, which was a West African kingdom located within present-day Benin that existed from approximately 1600 until 1904. The growth of Dahomey coincided with the growth of the Atlantic slave trade, and it became known to Europeans as a major supplier of slaves. As a highly militaristic kingdom constantly organised for warfare, it captured children, women, and men during wars and raids against neighboring societies, and sold them into the Atlantic slave trade in exchange for European goods such as rifles, gunpowder, fabrics, cowrie shells, tobacco, pipes, and alcohol. Other remaining captives became slaves in Dahomey, where they worked on royal plantations and were routinely mass executed in large-scale human sacrifices during the festival celebrations known as the Annual Customs of Dahomey.

• In the film, Nanisca confronts Ghezo about the immorality of selling black slaves to the Portuguese and suggests trading in palm oil production instead. While this conversation is fictional, it is based on the historic fact that the Agojie favored trading palm oil with the Europeans between 1840 to 1870. Whether they considered it immoral is unclear, especially given their history of participating in slave raids. Slavery in Dahomey persisted after the British Empire stopped Dahomey from continuing in the Atlantic slave trade. The British Empire's Royal Navy successfully blockaded Dahomey's slave-trading in the 1840s, which led to Dahomey's two political parties becoming polarized about what to trade.

• The fictional white Portuguese-speaking slave trader Santo Ferreira is portrayed as an enemy to Ghezo. According to "History vs. Hollywood", the character was "possibly loosely inspired" by Francisco Félix de Sousa, a Brazilian slave trader who in actuality helped Ghezo gain power.

• The Woman King was produced by Maria Bello and Cathy Schulman, written by Dana Stevens with contributions by Gina Prince-Bythewood, and directed by Prince-Bythewood. It is a co-production between TriStar Pictures and Entertainment One. In 2015, Bello went to the West African nation of Benin to learn the history of the Agojie. Convinced she had found a story worth telling, she returned to Los Angeles and recruited Schulman, then head of organization Women in Film, to help her make the film.

• On September 19, 2015, Bello used a moment when she was presenting actress Viola Davis with an award at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles to pitch her idea for the movie in front of the crowd, who cheered at the notion of seeing Davis in the lead role.

• Prince-Bythewood referenced epic films like The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Braveheart (1995), and Gladiator (2000), and athleticism as influences. Her background in sports gave her a perspective on the realism of fight scenes.

• Schulman first tried to set up the film at STX Films, where she was the head of the production, but the studio was only willing to offer an unsatisfactory $5 million. After leaving STX in 2016, Schulman worked with Bello, Davis, and Julius Tennon, Davis' husband and producing partner at JuVee Productions, to take the idea elsewhere. Studios who turned it down cited an unlikely chance for the film to turn a profit; others, according to Davis, wanted to cast light-skinned, well-known actresses, which they refused to do for historical accuracy and the audience's sake.

• The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2022.

• In the United States and Canada, The Woman King was released alongside Pearl, and was projected to gross around $12 million in its opening weekend from 3,675 theaters, with some studios estimating it could reach as much as $16 million. The film made $6.8 million on its first day, including $1.7 million from Thursday night previews. It went on to slightly over-perform and debut to $19 million, topping the box office. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film a rare average grade of "A+" on an A+ to F scale, while those at PostTrak gave the film a 95% overall positive score. Of the opening weekend audience, 60% was female, 58% was over the age of 35, and 59% was African-American.

• The Woman King is set in the kingdom of Dahomey in the year 1823. The kingdom existed from around 1600 through 1904, and the Agojie existed for most of that time.

• Historically, Dahomey was a kingdom that conquered other African states and enslaved their citizens to sell in the Atlantic slave trade, and most of the kingdom's wealth was derived from slavery. The Agojie had a history of participating in slave raiding, and that slavery in Dahomey persisted after the British Empire stopped Dahomey from continuing in the Atlantic slave trade.

• In the film's setting of the 1820s, Nanisca confronts Ghezo about the immorality of selling Dahomey slaves to the Portuguese and suggests trading in palm oil production instead. Nanisca being fictional, the confrontation did not take place. Smithsonian wrote, "Though Ghezo did at one point explore palm oil production as an alternative source of revenue, it proved far less lucrative, and the king soon resumed Dahomey’s participation in the slave trade."

• At the film's onset in the 1820s, as in real life, Dahomey is a tributary state of the Oyo Empire, which it had become in 1730. As portrayed in the film, Dahomey fought successfully to be freed from its status under Oyo. Also in the film, European colonization is a threat to Dahomey, but in real life, territorial disputes began with France in 1863 and led to the First Franco-Dahomean War in 1890, followed by the Second Franco-Dahomean War in 1892. France defeated Dahomey in 1894 and colonized it, and the kingdom became French Dahomey.