It is now, for the first time, that Coogler has revealed his initial plot for Wakanda Forever. Coogler and Cole said their first draft would have been a “father-son story” centering on T’Challa and her young son Toussaint in a new interview featured on The New York Times
The director detailed that this original version was “absolutely nothing” like the final film, and would have picked up after T’Challa’s disappearance for five years in Avengers: Endgame. While T’Challa was away, his partner Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) would have fathered his son, Toussaint. “In the script, T’Challa was a father who had an enforced five-year absence from his son’s life,” Coogler told the Times.
“The first scene was an animated sequence. You hear Nakia talking to Toussaint. She says, ‘Tell me what you know about your father.’ You realize that he doesn’t know that his father was Black Panther. She never met him, and Nakia remarried to a Haitian guy. Then we flash back to reality and it’s the night everyone comes back from the Blip. You see T ‘Challa meets the boy for the first time,'” the director commented.
The script would have been moved forward three years to follow T’Challa as he fathers his 8-year-old son. “Namor”, the villain played by Tenoch Huerta, would have been the main antagonist of the film in the same way. However, Coogler added that he and CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) would have had slightly different roles in the story.
“We had some crazy scenes for Chad,” Coogler said. “Our code name for the movie was ‘Summer Break,’ and the movie was about a summer the boy 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,” the director explained regarding the original project.
With Boseman’s sudden death, Coogler and Cole rewrote the story to chronicle Shuri following in her brother’s footsteps as she takes up the mantle of Black Panther. The final cut of the film features T’Challa’s son Toussaint (played by Divine Love Konadu-Sun) in a post-credits scene when Shuri visits Haiti to visit Nakia and meets his nephew for the first time.