“In my culture, death is not the end. It’s more of a stepping-off point,” T’Challa/Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) says in his debut appearance in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. “You reach out with both hands and Bast and Sekhmet, they lead you into the green veldt where you can run forever.” In 2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, King T’Challa joined his father, the late T’Chaka (John Kani), in the Ancestral Plane following his death from an unknown, incurable illness. (In reality, Boseman died at the age of 43 in 2020 after a private, years-long battle with colon cancer.)
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Marvel Studios paid tribute to Boseman in Wakanda Forever, choosing to retire — rather than recast — the character that Boseman had portrayed in four films between 2016 and 2019, including 2018’s groundbreaking Black Panther and Avengers sequels Infinity War and Endgame. In December 2020, Marvel Studios president and producer Kevin Feige announced that, to “honor the legacy that Chad helped us build,” the Marvel Cinematic Universe would not recast Boseman, and would instead “continue to explore the world of Wakanda and all the rich and varied characters introduced in the first film.”
The Ryan Coogler-directed Black Panther sequel addressed Boseman’s absence by reworking what was planned as a “father-son story,” passing the mantle of the Black Panther to T’Challa’s sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright), and introducing T’Challa’s young son: Toussaint/Prince T’Challa II (Divine Love Konadu-Sun).
It was a tasteful handling of Boseman’s tragic passing, ingraining a real-life loss into an epic elegy for a character — and an actor — gone too soon. That’s why some fans were dismayed when recently leaked concept art for Avengers: Doomsday appeared to show a character resembling Boseman’s T’Challa as the regal and reigning king of Wakanda.
The concept art sparked questions like: Is Marvel Studios recasting Boseman’s T’Challa? Is it a multiversal variant? A CGI recreation of Boseman’s likeness? Perhaps a younger T’Chaka, or an older T’Challa II? (Doomsday is set within the multiverse, and according to the concept art, appears to take place in the amalgam reality of Battleworld.)
However, the URL of the artist’s since-deleted ArtStation post identified the character as T’Chanda — not T’Challa. T’Chanda could be the mystery role that Denzel Washington revealed Coogler is writing for him in Black Panther 3 (which won’t be recasting T’Challa, according to Black Panther franchise producer Nate Moore).
“The truth is, there’s no truth to those [recast] rumors,” Moore recently told ComicBook when asked about a viral report claiming Marvel Studios is looking to cast a new Black Panther actor, potentially for Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. “Never say never to anything, [but] we haven’t really had a lot of creative conversations with Ryan Coogler yet, because he’s finishing his film Sinners, which comes out this year. We’ll get into it later this year, but everything you read online is not true, if for no other reason than we just haven’t started [working on it].”
In the comics, T’Chanda, also known by his regnal name as Azzuri the Wise, is T’Chaka’s son and T’Challa’s grandfather: the World War II-era Black Panther. 1993’s Fantastic Four Unlimited #1 revealed that Colonel Fritz Klaue betrayed Wakanda’s then-chieftain and tried to colonize the undiscovered African nation, resulting in the death of T’Chanda’s wife, Queen Nanali. After Klaue attempted to seize Wakanda’s most valuable natural resource, vibranium, T’Chanda ingested the Heart-Shaped Herb and became the Black Panther. T’Chanda took Klaue’s hand in battle, the beginning of a family feud that would span generations as Klaue’s son, Ulysses Klaw, became T’Challa’s archnemesis: the supervillain Klaw.
As the Black Panther, T’Chanda battled the American Super-Soldier Captain America in 1944, a battle that was glimpsed in 2005’s Black Panther #1 and played out in 2010’s World War II-set limited series Black Panther/Captain America: Flags of Our Fathers.
The Nazi-killing Black Panther became the first of the Black Panthers to fight alongside Steve Rogers. T’Chanda’s son, Prince T’Chaka, might have died had Gabe Jones — the only Black soldier serving in Nick Fury’s Howling Commandos — not saved the boy from one of the Red Skull’s underlings during their invasion of Wakanda.
Most recently, T’Challa’s ancestors — father T’Chaka, grandfather T’Chanda, uncle S’Yan, and their distant ancestor Bashenga — appeared before him from the afterlife during the Ta-Nehisi Coates-penned Black Panther run. After all, death is not the end for the Black Panther.
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Star Wars. Courtesy of Disney
