By now, you know the story of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” a meditation on grief and vengeance centered on the point of view of T’Challa’s sister Shuri (Letitia Wright), who eventually dons the mantle of the new Black Panther (read our review). You probably also know the story of the original ‘Wakanda Forever’ screenplay too; the one written after Chadwick Boseman’s death, and tragically, one he was never able to read before he passed. You’ve likely even heard the film was about T’Challa coming to terms with post-Thanos Snap, the Blip, being absent from Wakanda, and everyone who survived for five years.
But now, in a new New York Times interview with Coogler, the writer/director, who co-wrote the film with original “Black Panther” writer Joe Robert Cole, the filmmaker has basically spelled out the entire original story. The short version? Namor (Tenoch Huerta) was still the villain, but it was a movie about fathers and sons, and really about T’Challa being an absentee father for five years because of the Blip. And yes, some of this is similar to ‘Wakanda Forever’ Sometime after “Avengers; Infinity War,” Nakia [T’Challa’s love interest, played by Lupita Nyong’o], gives birth to their son Toussaint, and the original sequel idea was about T’Challa having to reckon with all that while battling the underwater super bad guy.
“It was, “What are we going to do about the Blip?” [In Marvel’s “Avengers: Infinity War,” T’Challa is one of the billions of people who suddenly vanish, only to be brought back by the Avengers five years later,]” Coogler explained. “That was the challenge. It was absolutely nothing like what we made. 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.”
“In the script, T’Challa was a dad who’d had this forced five-year absence from his son’s life,” Coogler continues with the original screenplay explanation. “The first scene was an animated sequence. You hear Nakia talking to Toussaint [the couple’s child, introduced in “Wakanda Forever” in a post-credits sequence]. 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. 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.”
Interestingly, it would have had an eight-year time line gap after ‘Infinity War.’
“Then it cuts ahead three years, and he’s essentially co-parenting,” Coogler continued. “We had some crazy scenes in there for Chad, man. 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.”
Coogler said the original version was wildly different and nothing like the final, but he likely means thematically, as many of the plot issues are the same.
“Yeah,” he said, confirming Namor was the original villain. “But it was a combination. Val [the C.I.A. director, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus] was much more active. It was basically a three-way conflict between Wakanda, the U.S., and Talokan. But it was all mostly from the child’s perspective.”
As for those that feel the inclusion of someone like Val feels forced and mandate that comes from Marvel, Joe Robert Cole was vehemently against the idea and said they were the ones that organically brought her into the story because of the geopolitical implications. “I’ve never had a conversation where I was asked to incorporate something that didn’t feel organic,” he said. “The dynamic of the U.S. being an instigator and Western powers being an instigator, that always existed.”
Coogler even revealed that Val was in the script before her appearances in “Black Widow” and “The Falcon And The Winter Solider,” but her role had to be cut back to make room for the grief of T’Challa’s death.
There you have it, pretty much all you’d want to know about the original ‘Wakanda Forever’ outside of reading that script.
