It’s pretty safe to say that Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is one of the Marvel titles that veers away the most from the studio’s standard way of storytelling. We all know there is a reason for that: Chadwick Boseman’s death forced the studio to reshape the story and forget the Marvel Cinematic Universe for a minute. However, in an interview to The New York Times, the movie’s director and screenwriter Ryan Coogler revealed that the original version of the script already featured the elements that would make it wildly different from the rest of the Marvel movies.

In the interview, Coogler broke down how the first, Chadwick Boseman-led Black Panther 2 already included Toussaint (Divine Love Konadu-Sun) – T’Challa and Nakia’s (Lupita Nyong’o) son – in the story. However, the kid’s reveal originally came in the very beginning of the movie. In Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Toussaint is only shown in the end-credits scene of the sequel. The idea, according to Coogler, was to show how T’Challa (Boseman) had missed the five first years of his son’s life because he was Blipped into dust by Thanos (Josh Brolin). The filmmaker broke the whole story down:

“It was absolutely nothing like what we made. It was going to be a father-son story from the perspective of a father, because the first movie had been a father-son story from the perspective of the sons. In the script, T’Challa was a dad who’d had this forced five-year absence from his son’s life [because of the Blip]. 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.”

Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther fights Michael B. Jordan as Kilmonger
Image via Marvel Studios

RELATED: Michael B. Jordan Reveals How He Kept His 'Black Panther: Wakanda Forever' Return a Secret

The Timeline of Original Black Panther 2 Would be At Least Eight Years

As Coogler made it clear, the original Black Panther sequel started off with a bang that completely changed the way we saw T’Challa’s return after half of humanity gets saved by the Avengers. But that wouldn’t be all. Coogler also revealed there would be another time jump right after the first one:

“Then it cuts ahead three years and [T’Challa is] essentially co-parenting. 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.”

With T’Challa’s death or not, it feels like both versions of Black Panther 2 are intimate stories about loss. In the first version, T’Challa does what he can because he knows he’ll never get those five years with his son back. In the new version, Wakandans have to come to terms with the fact that their leader is gone, and Shuri (Letitia Wright) has to make do with the situation she’s been given.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is in theaters now, and it's close to making $800 million at the box office. Disney+ is yet to announce when the blockbuster will be available to stream.

Check out our interview with Ryan Coogler below: