Marvel had been working on the ‘Black Panther’ sequel for almost a year when the unexpected death of Chadwick Boseman forced the studio to rethink the project. It will be next November 11 when everyone will be able to discover the new adventure of this universe of superheroes, but now the time has come to discover what it was like before suffering the tragic loss of its protagonist.
The consequences of Thanos’ snap
Has been Ryan Coogler, co-writer and director of the film, who has revealed what was going to be the great dramatic axis of ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ in an interview with Inverse:
The tone was going to be similar. The character was going to suffer the loss of time, you know, coming back after being away for five years. As a man with so much responsibility to so many, coming back after an enforced absence of five years, that’s what the film was about. He was suffering for the time that he could not recover. Pain was a major part of it.
Let’s remember that T’Challa was one of the many characters who fell victim to the thanos snap at the end of ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ and then return years later in ‘Avengers: Endgame’. That caused a power vacuum in Wakanda that would certainly be something Coogler wanted to explore in the sequel.
The also director of ‘Creed: The Legend of Rocky’ highlights that also there the villain was going to be Namor and that there were other aspects that were weighed and ultimately left out, but obviously other changes had to be made as a result of having someone else star:
Who is the protagonist, what are his faults and what is he dealing with during his journey. All of that had to be different for losing him and also the decisions we made about moving on.
And it is that in the film the dramatic axis becomes how to deal with the death of T’Challa, the void that this leaves in other characters, especially in Shuri (Letitia Wright) and how he tries to see how to carry on without him.