It is no secret “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” had to undergo extensive rewrites after the tragic passing of star Chadwick Boseman. Writer/director Ryan Coogler recently opened up about what he originally envisioned for the film and Boseman’s Black Panther. The script was originally written to be a father and son story about T’Challa getting to know his son with Nakia, Toussaint.
Since T’Challa was taken during Thanos’ Blip, this causes a five-year absence from his son’s life. Because of this, the original script for “Wakanda Forever” opened on an animated sequence where Toussaint’s mother Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) asks him what he knows about his father. “You realize that [Toussant] doesn’t know his dad was the Black Panther,” Coogler said. “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.”
While we often see stories like this told from the perspective of a child growing to understand their parent(s) better. The intent of “Wakanda Forever” was to make this a father-son story from the perspective of the father. After T’Challa returns script jumps to three years late with him essentially co-parenting. “We had some crazy scenes in there for Chad, man,” Coogler continued. “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.” And if we’d buy any superhero successfully saving the world with a kid in tow, it would be Black Panther.
But due to the loss of Boseman in 2020 from colon cancer, the film had to be overhauled. While it still remained a story about family. “Wakanda Forever” morphed into T’Challa passing away, and his sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) carrying on the legacy of Black Panther, while mourning his death.
