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Black Panther sequel was originally supposed to be a ‘father-son story.’
In an interview with The New York Times published on Friday, December 23rd, 2022, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever screenwriters opened up about the actual plot for the sequel had Chadwick Boseman had been alive.
Director Ryan Coogler screenwriter Joe Robert Cole had the first draft ready once Marvel greenlit the sequel following 2018’s movie. Boseman, who played the titular hero passed away in 2020 following his private battle with colon cancer, via The Hollywood Reporter.
In the interview, the duo discussed the personal and creative impact of losing Boseman ahead of the Marvel sequel’s release.
“That was the challenge. It was absolutely nothing like what we made,” Coogler said. “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,” Coogler narrated to the Times. “The first scene was an animated sequence. You hear Nakia talking to Toussaint. She says, ‘Tell me what you know about your father.’ You realise that he doesn’t know his dad was the Black Panther. He’s never met him, and Nakia is remarried to a Haitian dude,” Coogler explained. “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.”
But fans would not have just learned about Toussaint earlier. They would have also experienced the narrative through his eyes, along with a three-year time jump that sees T’Challa co-parenting.
Entertainment Weekly described that Namor, the villain played by Tenoch Huerta, would still have been the film’s primary antagonist. But Coogler added that he and CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) would have had slightly different roles in the story.
“We had some crazy scenes in there for Chad, man,” Coogler reflected. “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.”
After Boseman’s death, Coogler and Cole reworked the story to chronicle Shuri following in her brother’s footsteps as she takes up the mantle of Black Panther.