Ryan Coogler is revealing the story behind his original script for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
The Black Panther director, 36, told The New York Times in an interview that he and fellow screenwriter Joe Robert Cole had planned to center 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.
"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.
Coogler said 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 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," 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.
"We had some crazy scenes in there for Chad, man." Coogler said. "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."
He also revealed that Julia Louis-Dreyfus' character Val, who is the new head of the C.I.A. in the MCU, was supposed to be "more active" in the movie.
"It was basically a three-way conflict between Wakanda, the U.S. and Talokan," Coogler explained. "But it was all mostly from the child's perspective."
Coogler decided not to recast T'Challa and instead chose to rewrite the script focusing on the impact of his death – mirroring Boseman's – on Wright's character Shuri, as well as the rest of the cast.
Nyong'o, 39, told THR in October that in the final script, Coogler "wrote something that so honored the truth of what every one of us was feeling, those of us who knew Chadwick."
"He created something that could honor that and carry the story forward. By the end, I was weeping," she shared.
