Ryan Coogler and the team behind Black Panther: Wakanda Forever are amazing filmmakers and created a fantastic movie. Black Panther 2 is a success for both Marvel and for Coogler who directed the film. The movie was released in theaters in November 2022 as part of Marvel’s Phase 4 slate of projects. Black Panther 2 is a fantastic film that continues the stories of The Black Panther. The original Black Panther movie features Chadwick Boseman as the character T’Challa who serves as both King of Wakanda and as Black Panther. The team behind Wakanda Forever made the difficult decision to move forward without the character in this film.
We’re learning that director Ryan Coogler shares many details on the original plot for Black Panther 2. While promoting Black Panther: Wakanda Forever director Ryan Coogler shares:
“It was absolutely nothing like what we made. It was going to be a father-son story from the perspective of a father, because the first movie had been a father-son story from the perspective of the sons. In the script, T’Challa was a dad who’d had this forced five-year absence from his son’s life [because of the Blip]. The first scene was an animated sequence. You hear Nakia talking to Toussaint. She says, ‘Tell me what you know about your father.’ You realize that he doesn’t know his dad was the Black Panther. 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.”
Director Ryan Coogler continues to add even more when he shares that there would be another time jump right after the first one:
“Then it cuts ahead three years and [T’Challa is] essentially co-parenting. We had some crazy scenes in there for Chad, man. Our code name for the movie was ‘Summer Break,’ and the movie was about a summer that the kid spends with his dad. For his eighth birthday, they do a ritual where they go out into the bush and have to live off the land. But something happens and T’Challa has to go save the world with his son on his hip. That was the movie.”
What do you think of the alternate story for Black Panther 2 with Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa?
I would have liked to see T’Challa as a parent and it would have given the filmmakers an opportunity to explore a side of T’Challa that we’ve never seen. This makes me think of the emotional impact on Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau when she returned from the blip. That scene in Wandavision stands out and is one of the few moments that the MCU really explores the emotional impact of the Blip. I am also curious about life in Wakanda after the Blip and how they were impacted by the event. We know that many Wakandans vanished but I’d like to see more.
