While it wasn't exactly a huge surprise, one of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever's coolest moments came when Michael B. Jordan reprised the role of Erik Killmonger. Many fans had hoped the villain somehow survived his apparent death in Black Panther, though the sequel made it clear he's now at rest and causing trouble in the Ancestral Plane.
When Shuri consumes the Heart-Shaped Herb, it's Killmonger who is waiting for her there in place of T'Challa or Queen Ramonda. The former Black Panther attempts to influence her to continue heading down the dark path he was once on, though she later rejects his advice after briefly seeing her mother.
Talking to Rolling Stone, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever writer Joe Robert Cole opened up on the decision to bring Killmonger back for a cameo in the sequel.
"We always wanted to have Michael return, and I feel like it was always going to be in the ancestral plane with Shuri having taken the potion," he explains. "The question was always like, how do you achieve the thing I think that you’re talking about? How do you make it more than just more than just, everyone’s excited because Michael’s amazing, and the character’s amazing? How is it relevant to Shuri’s journey and become a pivot point for her character?"
"Then if you think about it, [in the first movie] his journey was about vengeance as well, and anger and frustration. That’s a part of what we tried to lay in with her early on, the anger of losing someone, the sense of loss. And then how losing her mother would escalate her feelings of wanting vengeance."
"We just tried to build on that, so that he is presenting her with a choice of: Is she going to move towards the direction that Killmonger would move? Or is she going to do something different?" the writer adds. "The idea was to successfully build the stakes for her so that would resonate. So it would feel earned that she would feel that sort of [yearning for] vengeance."
Cole would go on to explain that Killmonger's return also played into the bigger picture of what's happening in Wakanda, and how his invasion is what got T'Challa to look outward beyond his nation. Up until that point, Ramonda had been far more isolationist than her son but, in this movie, she saves Riri Williams, an African-American teenager.
"There is an argument that prior to Killmonger, that might not have happened," he adds. "So we're able to make that scene not only relevant to Shuri’s character, but also relevant to the nation of Wakanda."
That's certainly an interesting way of looking at things, and a very valid argument. It seems doubtful we'll see Killmonger again, though those of you anxious for more of Jordan's standout MCU villain can always see him get a major power increase over in What If...? on Disney+.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is now playing in theaters.