Black Panther writer and director Ryan Coogler has detailed the script for Black Panther 2 before the death of star Chadwick Boseman.
Boseman died in August 2020 aged 43 from complications of colon cancer, which he had battled privately for four years. He played T’Challa / Black Panther first in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, 2018’s Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War, 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, and then 2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever via archival footage.
Speaking on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Coogler said that he had finished the 180-page draft for Black Panther 2 and asked Boseman to check it out, but he was too sick to read it. Coogler has spoken in the past about the initial pitch for the movie, which would have been a post-Blip story featuring Boseman’s T’Challa returning after the events of Avengers: Endgame and a five-year absence and reconnecting with his son, Toussaint, who had little-to-no memory of his biological father.
“In the script, T’Challa was a dad who’d had this forced five-year absence from his son’s life,” Boseman told The New York Times in 2022. “The first scene was an animated sequence. You hear Nakia [T’Challa’s love interest, played by Lupita Nyong’o] talking to Toussaint [the couple’s child, introduced in Wakanda Forever in a post-credits sequence]. 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.
“Then it cuts ahead three years and he’s essentially co-parenting. We had some crazy scenes in there for Chad, man. Our codename for the movie was ‘Summer Break,’ and the movie was about a summer that the kid spends with his dad. For his eighth birthday, they do a ritual where they go out into the bush and have to live off the land. But something happens and T’Challa has to go save the world with his son on his hip. That was the movie.”
Now, Coogler has revealed more detail on this ritual and how it would have worked amid an attack by Namor, who ended up in Wakanda Forever under very different circumstances.
“The big thing about the script was there was this thing called the Ritual of Eight, where when a prince is eight years old he has to go spend eight days in the bush with his father. And amongst those eight days they have to go into the bush without any tools. The prince has to listen to and do everything that’s asked of him by his father. But the rule is for those eight days, the prince can ask the father any question and the father has to answer. And during the course of those eight days, Namor launches an attack. That was what the movie was. It was a different version of Namor in that script, but he had to deal with somebody who was like insanely dangerous, but because of this ritual his son had to be joined at his hip the whole time.
