Ryan Coogler, director and co-screenwriter of the saga, reveals what the second film would have been if the main actor had not died of cancer.
Black Panther: Wakanda Foreversecond part of the saga Black Panther unveiled last November, should have been very different from the film screened in theaters. The death of American actor Chadwick Boseman in 2020, star of the first film, forced its creators to completely rethink the script for this sequel.
Ryan Coogler, director and co-screenwriter, reveals in an interview with New York Times what the original script contained.
“It had nothing to do with what we ended up doing,” he says. “It had to be a story of a father-son relationship from a father’s perspective, because the first movie was a story of a father-son relationship from the perspective of sons.”
The filmmaker reveals that Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was to start with the reappearance of the superhero Black Panther – T’Challa à la ville -, five years after the tragic events of Avengers: Infinity Waranother film from the Marvel universe.
“In the (original) script, T’Challa was a father who was forced to be absent from his son’s life for five years.”
Complicated return
During this absence, his companion Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) would have given birth to their son, baptized Toussaint. “The first scene was an animated sequence where Nakia talks to Toussaint. She says, ‘Tell me what you know about your father’, and (the viewer) realizes he doesn’t know his father was Black Panther.
He never met her, and Nakia remarried a Haitian. Then, back to reality, and that’s the night that (T’Challa reappears). We see him meeting his son for the first time.”
“There was then a three-year time jump, and we discovered that he shared custody with Nakia,” he continues.
“We had crazy scenes for Chad (…) the film was about a summer that the son spends with his father. For his eighth birthday, they do a ritual for which they go to live in nature. But something happens and T’Challa has to go save the world with his son on his back. That was the movie.”
After the death of Chadwick Boseman at the age of 43 from colon cancer, two years after the worldwide success of Black Panther, the scenario of the second part has been completely reworked. The film opens with the death of the superhero and focuses on the mourning of his loved ones. “It’s a film about how grief and trauma change someone.”
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever sees another character don the Black Panther costume to take over from T’Challa, in order to counter the threat of Prince Namor (played by Tenoch Huerta). He was already the main antagonist of the first version of the script but the character of Val (the director of the CIA, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) played a more important role there than in the final version.
