Who Is the New Black Panther? [SPOILER] Takes on the Mantle After Chadwick Boseman’s Death
11.11.2022 - 08:23
/ usmagazine.com
Carrying his legacy. After Chadwick Boseman‘s 2020 death, Black Panther director Ryan Coogler decided that his Marvel character would also die and a new Black Panther would be born in Wakanda Forever. (WARNING: Spoilers ahead.)
“You consider everything, when something like that happens, it’s like ‘I don’t think I can come back and make another one, I don’t think I can do this. I don’t think there should be another one.’ You go through all of the extremes,” Coogler said on the November 4 episode of “Wakanda Forever: The Official Black Panther Podcast.”
The director considered recasting T’Challa briefly, but he knew it would be unfair to any actor joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe and having to follow Boseman, who died of colon cancer at age 43 in August 2020.
“For somebody else to be him, for us in the world that we created, we wouldn’t have believed it. No matter how good the actor was, it would’ve been lacking the necessary truth for us to do a good job,” he explained.
Thus, it was decided that T’Challa would die offscreen in very similar way to Boseman. In Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, audiences learn that the king didn’t tell his family he was terminally ill until it was too late. His sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright) was in the lab trying to recreate the heart-shaped herb, which gave him the superhuman powers of the Black Panther in the 2018 film. However, she didn’t have enough time to figure out the right chemical composition and her brother died.
T’Challa’s younger sister is the true star of the film. “Where we started was this idea of who would be the most affected by his loss,” Coogler told Variety in the Wednesday, November 9, cover story. “Shuri had never known a day without him. He’d always been there, so she