*“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” is reportedly the highest-grossing female-led superhero movie for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).
Per Box Office Mojo, “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s” domestic gross (so far) is $431.5 million, which topples the female-lead titles “Captain Marvel” at $426.8 million and “Wonder Woman” ($412.8 million) and “Black Widow” ($183.65 million).
As Movieweb reports, writer/director Ryan Coogler previously said: “I feel blessed that I have the opportunity to work on these movies, bro. When I got asked to do the first one, it was like a moving train. I thank God every day that I was able to jump on it and meet these people, these actors, and to meet Chadwick during some of the last years of his life. I’ll do it as long as folks will have me. But I think it’s bigger than just me or Joe. Between the first and second movie, we made $2 billion at the box office, which is what matters the most to corporations. So I hope that it continues, man. I hope people are still making movies about Wakanda long after we’re gone.”
Coogler recently revealed 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.”
He continued, “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 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 shared with Complex. “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.”
“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” is currently playing in theaters worldwide.
We Publish News 24/7. Don’t Miss A Story. Click HERE to SUBSCRIBE to Our Newsletter Now!
