Ryan Coogler reveals how Black Panther 2 would have panned out if Chadwick Boseman was alive: ‘It was going to be a father-son story’

It’s obvious that Black Panther: Wakanda Forever would have been a different film had Chadwick Boseman been alive, and now, director Ryan Coogler in an interview with The New York Times has revealed key plot points from the film’s original concept.

While Black Panther: Wakanda Forever introduced Toussaint (Divine Love Konadu-Sun), the son of T’Challa and Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) towards the end, Coogler’s initial plan was to make him a more central character. The director said that the film would have been about how T’Challa misses five years of his son’s formative years due to Thanos’ snap.

The filmmaker was quoted as saying, “It (Black Panther 2) 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 [because of the Blip]. 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 (sic).”