Writer/director Ryan Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole sat down for an interview with “The New York Times” where they discussed the initial plans for what would become “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” In it, they revealed that the initial pitch was a post-Blip story featuring T’Challa (to be played by the late Chadwick Boseman) returning after a five-year absence and reconnecting with a son who had little-to-no memory of his biological father.
“T’Challa was a dad who’d had this forced five-year absence from his son’s life. You realize that he doesn’t know his dad was the Black Panther. He’s never met him, and Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) 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.”
The film would have then cut ahead three years and concerned an outing between T’Challa and his son on the kid’s eighth birthday which gets sidetracked by a world-imperiling conflict.
“T’Challa has to go save the world with his son on his hip. That was the movie,” noted Coogler.
While the director stated that Namor (played in the current film by Tenoch Huerta) was always intended as an antagonist, he noted that the original treatment (conceived prior to Boseman’s shocking death from colon cancer in 2020) was closer to a three-way grudge match between Wakanda, Talokan and America personified by Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s CIA director.
Val, who first appeared in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” and again in the end-credits cookie for “Black Widow,” and is presumed to play a large role in the upcoming anti-hero/super villain team-up “Thunderbolts” movie, had an even larger role in the first version of “Black Panther 2.”
Cole emphasized that he never had a conversation (with Marvel or Disney) where “I was asked to incorporate something that didn’t feel organic. The dynamic of the U.S. being an instigator and Western powers being an instigator, that always existed.”
Coogler also noted that “nobody was shoehorned in or asked to be put into the movie.” He noted that they had the character on tap for his sequel before her prior MCU appearances and that (contrary to some critical chatter that argued that she felt forced in) she was in the film’s story from the beginning.
With earning grosses far below that of “Top Gun: Maverick” ($1.491 billion worldwide) or the first “Black Panther” ($1.346 billion in 2018), “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” is generally seen as a critical and commercial success. The $250 million-budgeted sequel has earned nearly $800 million worldwide and will soon pass the unadjusted domestic gross of “Captain Marvel” ($427 million in 2019) to become Marvel’s second-biggest “no Spider-Man and/or no Iron Man” theatrical release in North America behind only the first “Black Panther” ($700 million in 2018).
Coogler concluded by discussing his thoughts on a return trip to Wakanda.
“I’ll do it as long as folks will have me. But I think it’s bigger than just me or Joe. I hope people are still making movies about Wakanda long after we’re gone.”
With over $2 billion in worldwide theatrical grosses between two films, it’s likely that a “Black Panther 3” and/or Disney+ adventures in and around Wakanda will arrive sooner rather than later.
