Black Panther writer and director Ryan Coogler has detailed the script for Black Panther 2 before the death of star Chadwick Boseman.
Boseman died in August 2020 aged 43 from complications of colon cancer, which he had battled privately for four years. He played T’Challa / Black Panther first in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, 2018’s Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War, 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, and then 2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever via archival footage.
Speaking on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Coogler said that he had finished the 180-page draft for Black Panther 2 and asked Boseman to check it out, but he was too sick to read it. Coogler has spoken in the past about the initial pitch for the movie, which would have been a post-Blip story featuring Boseman’s T’Challa returning after the events of Avengers: Endgame and a five-year absence and reconnecting with his son, Toussaint, who had little-to-no memory of his biological father.
“In the script, T’Challa was a dad who’d had this forced five-year absence from his son’s life,” Boseman told The New York Times in 2022. “The first scene was an animated sequence. You hear Nakia [T’Challa’s love interest, played by Lupita Nyong’o] talking to Toussaint [the couple’s child, introduced in Wakanda Forever in a post-credits sequence]. 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.
“Then it cuts ahead three years and he’s essentially co-parenting. We had some crazy scenes in there for Chad, man. Our codename 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.”
Now, Coogler has revealed more detail on this ritual and how it would have worked amid an attack by Namor, who ended up in Wakanda Forever under very different circumstances.
“The big thing about the script was there was this thing called the Ritual of Eight, where when a prince is eight years old he has to go spend eight days in the bush with his father. And amongst those eight days they have to go into the bush without any tools. The prince has to listen to and do everything that’s asked of him by his father. But the rule is for those eight days, the prince can ask the father any question and the father has to answer. And during the course of those eight days, Namor launches an attack. That was what the movie was. It was a different version of Namor in that script, but he had to deal with somebody who was like insanely dangerous, but because of this ritual his son had to be joined at his hip the whole time.
“So while he was engaging in negotiations, fights, his son had to be right there or violate this ritual which had never been broken. So that was what the movie was. It was insane, and Chad was going to kill it, bro. But life goes as it goes. And I got a chance to make a movie about women. I love that movie so much, bro.”
The loss of Boseman radically changed the future of the franchise, and Coogler rewrote the movie to address his death and focus on T’Challa’s sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) instead. Wakanda Forever ended up being a movie as much about grief as it was moving the MCU forward or leading into the events of Black Panther 3, which Coogler has signed up to direct.
Coogler also talked about his special relationship with Boseman, and the impact his death had upon him.
“Our relationship was really interesting because he meant a lot to me,” Coogler said. “But I found out after his passing, from his family and from his friends, how much I meant to him, which f***ed me up pretty good. I wondered if he knew just how much he meant to me.
“He protected me from a lot. Our relationship was one of a lot of protection. On the toughest days on Panther, I was convinced that I was going to get fired. And I would say that all the time, like if the actors were taking their time to get out of makeup, I’m like, ‘Yo, you got to hurry up or they going to fire me.’ You know what I mean? And one day he took me to the side and he was like, ‘Yo, stop saying that.’ I was like, ‘Man, I really feel that way.’ He was like, ‘Look at me, bro. I would never let that happen to you. I would not let that happen to you.’
“Him saying that was like… in the moment it was like, ‘Well, that’s cool, but we got to go get to work.’ But looking back, he was always protecting me… always. To know one of the strongest people was having his strength taken from him by this disease, it damaged me, bro. Probably irreparably, to be honest with you.
“But I love that [Black Panther 2] script. I put so much into that version of the movie. Because I felt like I had gotten to know Chadwick as a performer. One of my favorite things to do with [Killmonger actor] Michael B. Jordan is like, I know him as a performer. I know what he’s capable of. And I know where he can be pushed and what he can handle, so I throw a lot at Mike. And I threw a lot of at Chad in the first Panther, but I realized I was just scratching the surface.”
Horowitz then asked Coogler why he’s making Black Panther 3 when he’s got nothing to prove, having found enormous success with the first two movies.
“I’m not making movies to prove anything,” he responded. “I’m telling stories that I want to tell, that I’m obsessed with, that I feel like the burning desire to do. It’s a movie that I’m incredibly excited about. That’s really the truth of it.”
He continued: “I’m in it for my heart. I got this movie on my heart. And yeah, from the outside looking in, you might say, ‘Man, why this f***ing dude making another one of those?’ But that’s totally fine. That question makes sense. I don’t deny that. And it’s my job as a filmmaker to show why.”
As for Black Panther 3, while it’s confirmed to be in the works (and will star Denzel Washington in an unannounced role), it sounds like a long way off. Coogler said he’s currently working on an X-Files revival for television, and Black Panther 3 comes after that.
“We intend on having both Monsters of the Week and the overarching conspiracy,” Coogler said of X-Files. “I’m grappling with that. But that’s what I’m doing now. Panther comes after that. I’m blessed to be working on things this cool.”
Photo by Tolga AKMEN / AFP) (Photo by TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty Images.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
