*Ryan Coogler’s script for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” has been panned over the lack of Black males in the movie, and how the Africans essentially get their asses whooped by Mexican superheroes, as Dr. Umar Johnon puts it. Not to mention that Angela Basset is done dirty in the movie.
Writer/director Coogler is speaking out about how the film might’ve played if leading man Chadwick Boseman was still with us. As you know, the actor passed away in 2020 after a private battle with colon cancer.
Speaking with The New York Times, Coogler said the plan was to unpack the five-year Thanos “blip” from “Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame” but Boseman’s death changed that.
“‘What are we going to do about the Blip?’ That was the challenge. It was absolutely nothing like what we made,” said Coogler. “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.”
Complex writes: ”As the mid-credits scene in Wakanda Forever revealed, Lupita Nyong’o’s Nakia is revealed to have given birth to a child with T’Challa during the five-year blip, which saw the character and many other MCU mainstays absent. The movie would’ve dealt with T’Challa’s absence from his son, and what impact that had on him and Nakia.”
“T’Challa was a dad who’d had this forced five-year absence from his son’s life,” Coogler revealed. “The first scene was an animated sequence. You hear Nakia talking to [their son] 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.”
Coogler continued, “Then it cuts ahead three years and he’s essentially co-parenting. We had some crazy scenes in there for Chad, man.”
He added, “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.”
After Boseman’s passing, the filmmakers had to flip the script from the original plans and decided to pay tribute to the actor.
“[We] wanted to make an ode to [Chadwick] and what he meant to us,” Coogler told Complex last month. “He meant both things to us. Chadwick was very much T’Challa for us, but T’Challa was only a facet of who Chadwick Boseman was and we wanted the film to be an ode to both of those things without sacrificing everything else.”
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