Black Panther 2’s Original Story Focused on the Events of Avengers: Endgame

Before the film was rewritten after the death of Chadwick Boseman, the sequel to Black Panther would have focused on the events of Avengers: Endgame.

In an interview with Inverse, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Director and Screenwriter Ryan Coogler says while the story has shifted in the wake of Boseman’s death, the original screenplay for the Black Panther sequel was always going to be about grief, as it would have dealt with the fallout of Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame; both of which focused on Thanos’ plan to eliminate half of all life using the Infinity Stones.

While the movie coming to theaters next week is about mourning Boseman’s character of T’Challa, the original script was about grieving the five years lost in the time between his death in Infinity War and resurrection in Endgame.

“The tone was going to be similar,” Coogler tells Inverse. “The character was going to be grieving the loss of time, you know, coming back after being gone for five years. As a man with so much responsibility to so many, coming back after a forced five years absence, that’s what the film was tackling. He was grieving time he couldn’t get back. Grief was a big part of it.”

Following Boseman’s death, Coogler reworked the movie with co-writer Joe Robert Cole to center other characters, though Namor the Sub-Mariner was always planned as the antagonist, even in the original script. Namor is played by Tenoch Huerta in Wakanda Forever.

“Who the protagonist was, the flaws of the protagonist, what the protagonist was dealing with in their journey, all of that stuff had to be different due to us losing him and the decisions that we made about moving forward,” Coogler says.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever arrives in theaters on November 11, with Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Winston Duke, and Angela Bassett reprising their roles from the first film. Newcomers include Huerta as Namor and Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams/Ironheart.

Kenneth Shepard is a writer covering games, entertainment, and queerness all around the internet. Find him on Twitter at @shepardcdr, and listen to his biweekly video game retrospective podcast Normandy FM, which is currently covering Cyberpunk 2077.