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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever director Ryan Coogler has revealed what he originally had planned for the Marvel sequel when he started drafting the script before Chadwick Boseman's death.
Boseman, who played T'Challa and the titular superhero in the first movie, died of colon cancer in August 2020. Coogler had already started drafting a script for Black Panther 2 earlier that summer.
Coogler said that the shift would be one of character rather than tone, as the movie was always going to be about grief. Instead of Wakanda grieving T'Challa, though, it was set to be about T'Challa mourning his time lost to 'the Blip' – he was one of the characters who disappeared for five years at the end of Avengers: Infinity War when Thanos used the Infinity Stone to wipe out half the universe.
"The tone was going to be similar," he told Inverse. "The character was going to be grieving the loss of time, you know, coming back after being gone for five years. As a man with so much responsibility to so many, coming back after a forced five years absence, that’s what the film was tackling. He was grieving time he couldn't get back. Grief was a big part of it."
However, the underwater ruler Namor, played by Tenoch Huerta, was always the movie's antagonist. "There were other characters, for sure, that we considered including," Coogler added. "Namor was always there."
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever hits the big screen on November 11. In the meantime, make sure you're up to date with the MCU with our recap of Marvel Phase 4 and our guide of what's to come in Marvel Phase 5.
