Black Panther: Wakanda Foreversecond part of the series Black Panther released last November, it should have been very different from the movie shown in theaters. The death of American actor Chadwick Boseman in 2020, the protagonist of the first film, forced its creators to completely rethink the script for this sequel.
Ryan Coogler, director and co-writer, reveals in an interview with New York Times what the original script contained.
“It had nothing to do with what we ended up doing,” he says. “It had to be a father-son story from a father’s perspective, because the first movie was a father-son story from the sons’ perspective.”
The filmmaker reveals that Black Panther: Wakanda Forever It was going to start with the reappearance of the superhero Black Panther -T’Challa à la ville-, five years after the tragic events of Avengers: infinity warAnother Marvel Universe movie.
“In the (original) script, T’Challa was a father who was forced to be absent from his son’s life for five years.”
complicated return
During this absence, his partner Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) would have given birth to their son, named Toussaint. “The first scene was an animated sequence in which Nakia talks to Toussaint. She says, ‘Tell me what you know about your father,’ and (the viewer) realizes that she doesn’t know that his father was Black Panther. .
He never met her and Nakia remarried to a Haitian. Then back to reality, and that’s the night that (T’Challa reappears). We see him meeting her son for the first time.”
“There was then a three-year time jump and we found out that he shared custody with Nakia,” he continues.
“We had crazy scenes for Chad (…) the movie was about a summer the son spends with his father. For his eighth birthday, they do a ritual whereby they go off to live in the wild. But something happens and T’ Challa has to go save the world with his son in tow. That was the movie.”
Following the death of Chadwick Boseman at age 43 from colon cancer, two years after the worldwide success of Black Panther, the scenario of the second part has been completely reworked. The film opens with the death of the superhero and focuses on the mourning of his loved ones. “It’s a movie about how pain and trauma change someone.”
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever sees another character don the Black Panther costume to replace T’Challa, in order to counter the threat from Prince Namor (played by Tenoch Huerta). He was already the main antagonist in the first version of the script, but the character of Val (the CIA director, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) played a bigger role there than in the final version.
Source: BFM TV
