Ryan Coogler’s original plans for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” were very different. The director confides on the subject.
Warning, spoilers. The following article reveals key plot elements of ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’.
Director Ryan Coogler has revealed his original plan for the Black Panther sequel. Indeed, before Chadwick Boseman’s death, the plot of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was much different.
In 2018, given the success of the first installment, Marvel Studios quickly announced a sequel. So Ryan Coogler and screenwriter Joe Robert Cole had set to work writing T’Challa’s next adventure and had just completed the first draft of the screenplay and sent it to Chadwick Boseman when the actor died in August. 2020 after secretly battling colon cancer. The loss of Boseman obviously drastically changed the future of the franchise, and the script was rewritten to include his death.
A “FATHER-SON” STORY…
As reported by Entertainment Weekly, Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole revealed the initial plot they had planned for Wakanda Forever in a new interview with The New York Times. Their first project would thus have been a “father-son story” centered on T’Challa and his young son Toussaint.
Ryan Coogler then explained that this original version was “absolutely nothing” like the final film currently in theaters, and would have picked up after T’Challa’s five-year demise in Avengers: Endgame. During his absence, his companion Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) would therefore have given birth to their son, Toussaint.
In the script, T’Challa was a father who had this enforced 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 realize he doesn’t know his father was the Black Panther. He never met her and Nakia remarried a Haitian guy. Then we cut to reality and it’s the night everyone comes back from the Blip. You see T’Challa meets the kid for the first time.
…WITH A GOOD IN TIME
The plot would then jump in time three years to follow T’Challa as he now co-parents his now 8-year-old son. Namor, the villain played by Tenoch Huerta, would still have been the film’s main 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. . Still interviewed by The Times, Ryan Coogler added:
We had some crazy scenes in there for Chad. Our code name for the film was ‘Summer Break’ and the film was about a summer the child spends with his father. 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.
Following Chadwick Boseman’s death, Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole reworked the story to focus on Shuri (Letitia Wright) following in her brother’s footsteps as she takes up the mantle of Black Panther. The film’s final cut features T’Challa’s son, Toussaint (played by Divine Love Konadu-Sun) in an end credits scene, as Shuri flies to Haiti to visit Nakia and thus meets his nephew. for the first time.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is currently still in theaters while the first installment with Chadwick Boseman to (re) see on Disney+.