Wakanda Forever was supposed to be a father-son story, says director Ryan Coogler
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Los Angeles: Director Ryan Coogler said the original script for 'Black Panther: Wakanda Forever' was a father-son story. He had to change it after lead actor Chadwick Boseman died.
Coogler and his screenwriter Joe Robert Cole had planned to centre the sequel on King T'Challa aka Black Panther struggling to learn how to be a father. "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," reported The New York Times.
The duo had shared the script with Boseman in 2020 before he died due to colon cancer the same year.
Coogler told People Magazine that King T'Challa was supposed to come back from the "blip" and find out that he had a son named Toussaint with his former lover Nakia. The "blip" took place in Avengers: Infinity War when villain Thanos wiped out half the population. Several characters including T'Challa died for five years before the remaining characters reversed history in the next movie Avengers: Endgame.
In the original script, Nakia married a Haitian person and is raising her son with him. The child doesn't know his father was the Black Panther. When T'Challa comes back from the blip. he is forced to co-parent.
"In the script, T'Challa was a dad who'd had this forced five-year absence from his son's life. The first scene was an animated sequence. You hear Nakia talking to Toussaint. She said, 'Tell me what you know about your father.' You realise 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. Then it cuts ahead three years and he's essentially co-parenting," said Coogler.
The team did not entirely dismiss this aspect of the story even though Black Panther: Wakanda Forever did not follow this plot. In the end credits scene, it is shown that Toussaint is meeting T'Challa's sister Shuri.