Ryan Coogler discloses Wakanda Forever was a father-son story before Boseman’s death

Los Angeles, December 25

Director Ryan Coogler has revealed the story behind his original script for ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’.

The ‘Black Panther’ director, 36, said that he and fellow screenwriter Joe Robert Cole had planned to centre the sequel on Chadwick Boseman’s character T’Challa struggling to learn how to be a father, before Boseman’s death to colon cancer in 2020, reports People magazine.

He made the revelation in The New York Times interview. “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,” Coogler said, noting that they had shared the script with Boseman in 2020.

According to People, Coogler said that they had to work around the idea of the “blip” which took place in Avengers: Infinity War and led to T’Challa and several other Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) characters disappearing for five years. He said T’Challa was supposed to come back from the event to find out that he had a son named Toussaint, with his former love Nakia, played by Lupita Nyong’o.

“In the script, T’Challa was a dad who’d had this forced five-year absence from his son’s life,” Coogler said. “The first scene was an animated sequence. You hear Nakia talking to Toussaint. She said, ‘Tell me what you know about your father.’ You realise that he doesn’t know his dad was the Black Panther'”.

“He’s never met him, and Nakia is remarried to a Haitian dude,” he added. “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. Then it cuts ahead three years and he’s essentially co-parenting.” The writers eventually ended up keeping that story element in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, introducing Toussaint to T’Challa’s sister Shuri, played by Letitia Wright, in an end credits scene.

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