Last Updated: December 28, 2022, 19:56 IST
Black Panther director Ryan Coogler reveals second film’s original plot
Ryan Coogler, the director of Black Panther revealed in his recent interview, that film’s second franchise was supposed to be centred around T’Challa, played by Chadwick Boseman.
Black Panther films have a dedicated fan base. The fandom of the movie increased manifold after the demise of Chadwick Boseman who played the lead role of T’Challa in the much-loved film by the Marvel Film Universe. After the release of Black Panther, MCU fans were eager to see the story developing into yet another movie, however, Chadwick Boseman’s death left everyone heartbroken. Soon after Boseman’s demise, questions about Black Panther’s sequel sprung up. As questions about the character’s fate kept swirling around, the makers shared that won’t recast the superhero and hence the storyline was changed. Now, in an interview with The New York Times, Ryan Coogler, the director of Black Panther, revealed that the original plan for the second film, Wakanda Forever, had been significantly different.
Coogler explained that the film was originally going to be a “father-son story” that centred around T’Challa, played by Chadwick Boseman, and his son Toussaint. The film was going to explore the dynamic between the two characters after T’Challa had been absent for five years due to the “Blip,” a plot point from Infinity War. The ‘Black Panther’ director said that he and fellow screenwriter Joe Robert Cole had planned to centre the sequel on Chadwick Boseman’s character T’Challa struggling to learn how to be a father, before Boseman’s death to colon cancer in 2020, reported People magazine.
Coogler shared that the film was going to open with an animated sequence featuring Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) asking Toussaint about his memories of his father, followed by a scene showing T’Challa meeting his son for the first time after being brought back from the Blip. The rest of the film was going to focus on T’Challa co-parenting with his son and eventually going on a mission to save the world with him.
Coogler further shared, “In the script, T’Challa was a dad who’d had this forced five-year absence from his son’s life. The first scene was an animated sequence. You hear Nakia talking to Toussaint. She said, ‘Tell me what you know about your father.’ You realise that he doesn’t know his dad was the aBlack Panther'”.
He added, “He’s never met him, and Nakia is remarried to a Haitian dude. Then, we cut to reality and it’s the night that everybody comes back from the Blip. You see T’Challa meet the kid for the first time. Then it cuts ahead three years and he’s essentially co-parenting.”
As fans would know, due to Boseman’s passing, the film had to be rewritten. Wakanda Forever was released in theatres last month and made over USD 180 million in its opening weekend in the US.
The writers eventually ended up keeping that story element in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, introducing Toussaint to T’Challa’s sister Shuri, played by Letitia Wright, in an end credits scene.
