Marshall is a 2017 American biographical legal drama film directed by Reginald Hudlin and written by Michael and Jacob Koskoff.

It stars Chadwick Boseman as Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court Justice, and focuses on one of the first cases of his career, the State of Connecticut v. Joseph Spell.

It also stars Josh Gad, Kate Hudson, Dan Stevens, Sterling K. Brown, and James Cromwell.

The project was announced in December 2015, along with Boseman's casting, and principal photography began in Los Angeles in mid-December 2015 and moved on to Buffalo and Niagara Falls, New York.

In April 1941, Thurgood Marshall is an NAACP lawyer traveling the country defending people of color who are wrongly accused of crimes because of racial prejudice.

Upon his return to his New York City office, he is sent to Bridgeport, Connecticut, to defend Joseph Spell, a chauffeur accused of rape by his white employer, Eleanor Strubing, in a case that has gripped the newspapers.

Marshall and Friedman investigate Strubing's story that Spell tied her up in the back seat of her car after raping her and drove to a bridge to throw her over.

[14] In the United States and Canada, Marshall was released alongside Happy Death Day, The Foreigner, and Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, and was expected to gross $3–4 million from 821 theaters in its opening weekend.

The site's critical consensus reads, "Marshall takes an illuminating, well-acted look at its real-life subject's early career that also delivers as an entertainingly old-fashioned courtroom drama.

"[20] Manohla Dargis for The New York Times praised the film for choosing a specific case as a way of exploring Marshall's life, but is critical of the simplified characterizations and the efforts made throughout to put the audience at ease.

One aspect that is 'flattened out' in this film is the colorism of U.S. society, which resulted in light-skinned Thurgood Marshall having much different life experiences than if he had had the skin tone of Chadwick Boseman.