We’ll never know for sure what it would have been like to see Chadwick Boseman return as T’Challa inBlack Panther 2, but some new details about the original script for the sequel shed some light on what fans could have expected. Prior to the sudden passing of Boseman in 2020,Ryan Cooglerhad written a screenplay that featured Boseman back in the lead role as T’Challa. Sadly, Boseman died before he got the chance to read it, and the script was tossed to a new story could be written around T’Challa’s absence.
In a new interview with theNew York Times, however, Coogler opened up some more on the original screenplay. He explains how the sequel would have acknowledged the Blip with T’Challa returning after a 5-year absence, at which point he’d be meeting his son for the first time. Much of the film would have focused on T’Challa co-parenting and building a relationship with his son, serving as a bit of a father-son story that was completely different in tone fromBlack Panther: Wakanda Forever. As Coogler says:
“What are we going to do about the Blip? That was the challenge. 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. The first scene was an animated sequence. You hear Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) talking to [the couple’s child] 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.”
Related:Director Ryan Coogler Releases Statement Thanking Fans for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s Success
Coogler goes on to add how the plot of the sequel would have essentially followed T’Challa and his son on a journey together to save the world after coming under threat while spending time together in the wilderness. While it’s unclear how the other returning character would have played into this plot, Coogler emphasizes how the father-son relationship was the heart of the unmade version of the sequel.
“It cuts ahead three years and he’s 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.”
As we know now,Black Panther: Wakanda Foreveracknowledges Boseman’s death by explaining that T’Challa had passed away after the events of the first film. In the sequel, the leaders of Wakanda continue on, fighting to protect their nation while honoring T’Challa. It featured many returning stars from the original film, such as Lupita Nyong’o, Letitia Wright, Angela Bassett, Danai Gurira, Winston Duke, and more.
