Ryan Coogler Reveals Original Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Plans Before Chadwick Boseman’s Death

The tragic death of Chadwick Boseman in 2020 shook Hollywood to its core, in part because no one was even aware the actor was sick. Having become a household name very quickly thanks to his work in film, where he played Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, and the MCU’s T’Challa aka the Black Panther, Boseman’s place in film history was already cemented before he was taken too soon. Considering the major role he had in the MCU, the franchise that prided itself on interconnectivity and extensive planning was forced to make major changes to the highly anticipated Black Panther sequel.

Though it took a few years before Black Panther: Wakanda Forever would be released by Marvel Studios, fans know that the film had been in extensive development before Boseman’s death. Details about what that film would have included or been about have largely been scarce, though we do know that the tensions between the kingdoms of Wakanda and Namor’s Atlantis were still set to be a major focal point. Now, filmmaker Ryan Coogler has pulled back the curtain on the original script and how different it would have been.

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As fans know, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever became a film about grief, and the women in the life of T’Challa who had to carry on in the face of his loss. The film ended with a big tease for the future, that the deceased king had fathered a son with Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), who carried his name, T’Challa. Speaking on the latest episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Coogler revealed that the initial script would have been entirely about T’Challa’s relationship with his father, and how they would have framed the entire movie around it.

“The big thing about the script was it was a thing called the Ritual of Eight,” Coogler revealed about the “180 page draft” he originally wrote. “Where when a prince is 8 years old, he has to go spend 8 days in the bush with his father, and they have to go out into the bush without any tools and the prince has to do everything that is asked of him by his father, but the rule is for those 8 days the prince can ask the father any question and the father has to answer, and during the course of those 8 days, Namor launches an attack. So that was what the movie was, he had to deal with someone, and it was a different version of Namor in that script, but someone who’s insanely dangerous, but because of this ritual, his son had to be joined at his hip the whole time.”

He added, “So while he was engaging in negotiations, fights, and sh-t, his son had to be right there or have to violate this ritual, which had never been broken. So that was what the movie was. It was insane, and Chadwick was going to kill it, but life goes as it goes.”

Though Coogler noted how much hard work he put into the original script of the movie, he was quick to point out how much he loves the version of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever that did get released. “I got a chance to make a movie about women, I love that movie so much, bro.”