Ryan Coogler Opened Up About The Original Plot Of 'Wakanda Forever'

Marvel

Dec 28

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever had a smashing success upon its premiere. With a box office revenue of over $800 million, the movie is firmly in the top 7 worldwide for performance in 2022. The storyline was beautiful, and it is hard to imagine anything else, even though it was a complete 180 from the first draft.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, director/writer Ryan Coogler and screenwriter Joe Robert Cole discussed what the movie could have been. Coogler, in particular, described the original vision and how things were changed.

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WARNING: SPOILERS FOR BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER

Coogler was ready to tackle the Blip situation head-on, creating a parallel narrative structure to the first Black Panther movie:

“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.”

There would be a five-year gap where T’Challa’s son would not know his father. Coogler further described the original structure of the movie:

“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 realize that he doesn’t know his dad was the Black Panther…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.”

The movie was meant to progress from there, showing the growing relationship between T’Challa and his son. Coogler said that “it cuts ahead three years, and he’s essentially co-parenting.” The father-son duo spends the child’s eighth birthday living off the land. During this time, “something happens and T’Challa has to go save the world with his son on his hip.”

Suri holding T'Challa's helmet — Image Source: IMDb

It is incredibly emotional to think about what could have been if Chadwick Boseman was not taken from the world too soon. There were similar themes in the original script, although grief was presented in a different form. Despite the changes, the final cut of the movie was still gorgeous and impactful.

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