Shareif Ziyadat/Getty; Marvel/Disney/Kobal/Shutterstock Ryan Coogler; Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa
Ryan Coogler is revealing the story behind his original script for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
The Black Panther manager, 36, said The New York Times in an interview that he and fellow screenwriter Joe Robert Cole had planned to center the sequel on Chadwick Boseman’s character T’Challa, who struggles to learn how to be a father, before Boseman’s death from colon cancer in 2020.
“It was going to be a father-son story from a father’s perspective, because the first movie had been a father-son story from the sons’ perspective,” Coogler said, noting that they had shared the script with Boseman in 2020. .
Coogler said they had to work around the idea of the “blip” that took place in Avengers: infinity war and led to T’Challa and several other Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) characters disappearing for five years. He said that T’Challa was supposed to return from the event to find out that she had a son named Toussaint, with her former flame Nakia, played by Lupita Nyong’o.
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“In the script, T’Challa was a father who took a five-year forced 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 he doesn’t know that his father was Black Panther.”
Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney
“She never met him, and Nakia remarried to a Haitian guy,” she added. “Then we cut to reality and it’s the night everyone comes back from the Blip. You see T’Challa meet the kid for the first time. Then fast forward three years and he’s essentially co-parent.”
The writers eventually ended up keeping that story element in black panther: wakanda forever, introducing Toussaint to T’Challa’s sister Shuri, played by Letitia Wright, in an end credits scene.
“We had some crazy scenes for Chad, man.” Coogler said. “Our code name for the movie was ‘Summer Break,’ and the movie was about a summer the boy 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.”
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He also revealed that Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s character Val, who is the new head of the CIA in the MCU, was supposed to be “more active” in the film.
“It was basically a three-way conflict between Wakanda, the United States and the Talokan,” Coogler explained. “But it was all mostly from the child’s perspective.”
Coogler decided not to play T’Challa again, and instead chose to rewrite the script focusing on the impact of his death, mirroring Boseman’s, on Wright’s character Shuri as well as the rest of the cast.
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Nyong’o, 39, said THR in October that in the final script, Coogler “wrote something that honored the truth of what each of us felt, those of us who knew Chadwick.”
“He created something that could honor that and carry the story forward. By the end, I was crying,” she shared.