The Black Panther sequel's screenplay was pretty much done before Chadwick Boseman tragically passed away following a lengthy battle with cancer. Unaware of how ill the actor was, Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole had penned a story revolving around T'Challa that, until now, has mostly remained a mystery to us.
After Boseman died, the decision was made to rewrite the script, and while many elements remained - such as Namor's MCU debut - the story ended up becoming one about grief and Shuri's journey to inheriting the Black Panther mantle.
Talking to The New York Times, Coogler revealed what the movie originally looked like, explaining that it was set to pick up with the hero following the events of Avengers: Endgame before jumping a few years into the future to tell a story about T'Challa and his son, Toussaint.
However, the most interesting reveal here is that the movie would have primarily taken place from the child's perspective!
"It was, 'What are we going to do about the Blip?' 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. The first scene was an animated sequence. You hear Nakia talking to Toussaint. 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."
"Then it cuts ahead three years and he’s essentially co-parenting. 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."
That something would have been Namor, though it sounds like in this version of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine had a much larger role as an antagonist alongside Talokan's King.
"[It] was a combination. Val was much more active," Coogler adds. "It was basically a three-way conflict between Wakanda, the U.S. and Talokan. But it was all mostly from the child’s perspective."
It sounds like we missed out on a really special movie here, but we can't fully complain about the version we ended up getting. While we'd obviously have preferred to see this original take - as Boseman would still be with us - Coogler still delivered a breathtaking emotional tour de force of a movie, and a beautiful tribute to the actor and character.
Let us know your thoughts on the filmmaker's comments in the usual place.