At last month's San Diego Comic-Con, Marvel Studios announced that filmmaker Ryan Coogler would return to direct Black Panther 3. David Jonsson will play the new T'Challa (well, T'Challa II), while Letitia Wright and Winston Duke are set to return as Shuri and M'Baku.
While there's speculation that the MCU's Storm will appear in the threequel, The Cosmic Circus has revealed some possible plot details and a big return.
According to the site, a "portion" of Black Panther 3 will be set in Talokan, Namor the Submariner's underwater kingdom. Tenoch Huerta is expected to return as the Atlantean anti-hero, along with Mabel Cadena as Namora and Alex Livinalli as Attuma. Casting is also underway for Wakandan and Talokan extras.
In 2022's Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Namor and Shuri initially butted heads before forming an uneasy alliance. Namora wasn't happy with her King's decision, but he reminded her that Wakanda has no allies and would eventually be forced to fight alongside Talokan.
That's a plot point likely to be touched on in Avengers: Doomsday, as the site reveals, "Shuri and M'Baku will seek Namor's help in [the movie], building upon the lore of the two nations and the personal relationship/tension between Shuri and Namor."
"Namor may be forced to bend the knee once again, but this time towards another ruler [to] save his people," the site adds, suggesting Namor will ally with Doctor Doom, which they later suggest could hurt his standing with both Shuri and his people.
Finally, it's said that Angela Bassett is expected to reprise her role as Queen Ramonda. There's no word on what she'll bring to the story, though it sounds like the Ancestral Plane will have a much bigger role in Black Panther 3, so that may be the answer.
"I’ll give you the real scoop. We hadn’t started a search yet," Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige previously said of casting Jonsson. "Ryan was working on Sinners, and when Ryan works on a project he’s all in. So the presumption very much was we would sit with him after Sinners came out, after the Academy campaign. We were waiting ’til after the Academy Awards to sit with Ryan and begin that process."
"A month and a half or so before that process, he called me and said, 'I found him.' I said, 'What do you mean?' He goes, 'I found him. He’s this guy, David Jonsson.' He mentioned his movies. I had seen some of them. I watched more. He goes, 'I’m going to meet him.' He had a secret meeting with him under the cloak of darkness in a hotel somewhere."
"He called me afterwards and said, 'He’s the guy, he’s the guy, I felt it. I felt it in my soul. He’s a good man, and he is the next Black Panther,'" Feige continued. "And I got chills, and I got a little welled-up and said, 'Let’s do it.' So we’ve been sitting on this secret for a good five or six months."
Black Panther 3 will be released in theaters on December 15, 2028.