Back in 2020, everyone was taken aback by the sad and tragic news that Chadwick Boseman had died of colon cancer. What made it even more heartbreaking was the fact that the actor battled the disease quietly for many years, and practically no one knew that his health was deteriorating. For Black Panther: Wakanda Forever director and screenwriter Ryan Coogler, losing his star meant that, sooner than he’d like, he’d have to go back to the drawing board and find the strength to write a story he knew his friend wasn’t going to participate in – at least not physically.
During an interview with The Official Black Panther Podcast, Coogler revealed that he thought about abandoning the project, because it was too hard to move on. The filmmaker also revealed that the original script – which was, of course, a story completely focused on King T’Challa – was already complete and ready to hit its final drafts by the time of Boseman’s death:
“I had just finished it. My last conversation with him was calling him and asking if he wanted to read it before I got notes from the studio. That was the last time we spoke, and he passed maybe a couple of weeks after I finished. […] He was tired, bro. I could tell he was tired. I’d been trying to get a hold of him for a few days. […] I could tell something was up. But he was joking and laughing, talking about how he was planning a wedding in South Carolina, talking about the people he was going to invite. […] And then he said he didn’t want to read it, because he didn’t want to get in the way of whatever notes the studio might have, so he was like ‘It’s better if I read it later.’ But I found out later that he was too tired to read anything.”
Coogler Explains How Was The First Script for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Even though this is a script that most people will never get to read, Coogler gives some broad strokes about what he was thinking, and that Namor (Tenoch Huerta) and the kingdom of Atlantis were always part of the adventure — which was conceived before Aquaman was released. He started working on the script in late 2018:
“The second script was like a T’Challa vehicle. I was like, ‘ok, we set the world up, now we’re going to do the deepest dive into this guy that you can imagine. And that was what excited me even more: I knew Chad[wick Boseman] better as a performer, and I knew him better as a guy, [and] T’Challa as a character after making that first film. So I got to writing that thing immediately.”
The new version of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever incorporates T’Challa’s death into the story and, as Coogler also indicates in the interview, becomes a movie that deals with the fact that sometimes leaders die. At the same time, the extended runtime (2 hours and 40 minutes) provides room both for mourning and introducing a new Black Panther, which trailers suggest is T’Challa’s sister Shuri (Letitia Wright). But we’ll have to wait until the movie premieres to be 100% sure.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever premieres on November 11.
You can watch the latest trailer below: