During a recent interview, Ryan Coogler, writer-director, and co-screenwriter Joe Robert Cole revealed more information about the original plans for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” They described many details about the original plan for the movie before Chadwick Boseman’s passing. The movie plot many of us enjoyed, “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” could have been very different. Still, “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” maintains this year’s second-highest box office gross sales behind “Top Gun: Maverick.

For many fans of Black Panther from comics and movies, any grain of information about the original projects grabs their attention. In a recent interview, those fans received information about the original plan.

“This film was difficult in ways that only the people who made it would know,” Ryan Coogler said. “There are things we put in there that felt revolutionary, that challenged the definition of having ‘a good time’ in a movie like this.” With Boseman’s passing, dealing with your grief became a central idea for the film as opposed to the previous concept.

If you have not seen the movie “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” important plot details will be mentioned in the rest of this article. To explain the critical elements of the interview, that type of information will be unavoidable.

For example, Coogler said in this interview that the original idea was going to handle the “blip” in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He noted that with T’Challa being gone and brought back five years later, they had never done anything like that before. However, Coogler said, “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.”

For the original plan, T’Challa would return from a five-year absence due to the blip to reconnect with this biological son. His son, of course, would have no memory of him.

The first scene of the original script was to be an animated sequence. You hear Nakia, the mother of T’Challa’s child and his love interest, talking to their son, Toussaint. Yes, that Toussaint from the post-credit scene in “Wakanda Forever.” In the original version, we would learn that Toussaint does not know anything about his dad. Nakia would be remarried to a Haitian gentleman. In the original script, we would see the first meeting of the Black Panther and his son.

Coogler said, “Then it cuts ahead three years and he’s essentially co-parenting.” He also said, “… 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.”

In addition, we learned from this interview that Val (Valentina Allegra de Fontaine) character, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, played a much more significant role in the original script. They said that the movie would have functioned as a three-way battle between Wakanda, the Talokan led by Namor, and the United States of America led by Val since she is head of the CIA. Several scenes featuring Val failed to make final cut to handle the new plot’s emphasis on grief.

Regarding the decision to open with T’Challa’s death in the final movie, Cole wanted to explain that change. He stated, “…everyone was going to be waiting to see how we dealt with it, so doing it right up front made sense. Regarding the characters, we needed to introduce a different version of Shuri [T’Challa’s sister, played by Letitia Wright]. We’re showing the moment that she becomes a different person than the person we met. She’s the smartest person in the world, but she can’t save her brother. What does that do to you?”

When asked why T’Challa died of an illness in the final movie, Coogler had some solid reasoning for the character development of Shuri. He said, “We wanted to keep it simple. At the end of the day, what mattered is that she had a self-expectation of being able to be solve it and she failed. And we didn’t want her to have anywhere to displace her anger. If somebody else would’ve taken T’Challa out, Shuri would’ve looked for that person. We wanted it to be a situation where the only place to go was internal.”

What do you think of the original film ideas? Comment and let us know!