Actor Chadwick Boseman passed away after a lengthy, secret battle with cancer, bringing his time as T'Challa in the MCU to a premature, devastating end. The plan had obviously been for him to star in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, but Marvel Studios went back to the drawing board in the wake of his death and overhauled the story.
Talking to Inverse, filmmaker Ryan Coogler shed some light on original plans for the sequel, confirming we would have picked up with the King of Wakanda struggling in the wake of being dusted for five years.
"The character was going to be grieving the loss of time, you know, coming back after being gone for five years," he explains. "As a man with so much responsibility to so many, coming back after a forced five years absence, that’s what the film was tackling. He was grieving time he couldn’t get back. Grief was a big part of it."
We're assuming that would have seen the hero dealing with what became of his home without a Black Panther, not to mention some possible personal losses. We're guessing this might also explain rumours the sequel was going to introduce T'Challa's son, likely meaning the hero would have come back to discover a child who had started growing up without him.
One thing that did stay the same was Namor the Submariner "always [being] the antagonist," and while changes were made to other characters, "[he] was always there."
"Who the protagonist was, the flaws of the protagonist, what the protagonist was dealing with in their journey," Coogler added, "all of that stuff had to be different due to us losing [Chadwick] and the decisions that we made about moving forward."
Chances are original plans for the Black Panther franchise will never be made fully clear to us. Shuri becoming the new Panther much further down the line was always likely, but it's obviously happened much sooner than anyone anticipated.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever arrives in theaters on November 11.