Black Panther: Wakanda Forever writer and director Ryan Coogler revealed the intricated background story of the movie; and how it was supposed to take place before the tragic death of the original film’s star, Chadwick Boseman.
In an interview with the New York Times, Coogler describes how the original intention was for the film to focus on the relationship between fathers and sons. Initially, the movie would have dealt with T’Challa‘s five-year absence following “The Blip,” the mass extinction caused by Thanos.
“In the (original) script, T’Challa was a dad who’d had this forced five-year absence from his son’s life,” Coogler said. “The first scene was an animated sequence. You hear Nakia talking to Toussaint. 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.”
Coogler then talked about what was supposed to happen three years after the conclusion of The Avengers: Infinity War. Coogler describes what Boseman’s character would have gone through; Coogler says
“We had some crazy scenes in there for Chad, man. 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 the tragic passing of Boseman, Coogler had to rewrite the script by writing the version we saw on screen, where Wakanda Forever became a meditation on grief and vengeance, centered around T’Challa’s sister Shuri played by Letitia Wright, who would then become the new Black Panther.
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