While “Black Panther 3” is set to be director Ryan Coogler‘s next big film, he’s finally shedding some light on its predecessor and the original story that was supposed to play out in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”
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As we know, star Chadwick Boseman’s death in 2020 seriously changed the trajectory of “Wakanda Forever” and put the franchise’s unfolding in flux. Specifically when it comes to the second iteration of the “Black Panther” franchise, there were reports at the time that Coogler had to go back to the drawing board and rework things now that the titular character would be absent.
Now, in a new interview on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast, Coogler revealed to host Josh Horowitz what that first “Black Panther 2” script was going to be about–and if we’re being completely honest–it sounds like a complete banger!!
During their chat, Coogler said that the script was going to center around Boseman’s T’Challa, the relationship with his 8-year-old and their fight against Namor (played by Tenoch Huerta).
“The big thing with the script was a thing called the Ritual of 8 where a prince is 8 years old, he must spend eight days in the bush with his father,” Coogler shared. “The rule is for those eight days the prince can ask the father any question and the father must answer. In the course of those eight days, Namor launches an attack, he had to deal with someone who’s insanely dangerous but because of this ritual, his son had to be joined at his hip the whole time or else they’d violate this ritual that had never been broken. It was insane. Chadwick was going to kill it, but life goes as it goes.”
Coogler said that he finished the 180-page script and sent it to Boseman to read it but that he was “too sick” to give it a look. In a separate interview with the New York Times, he also shared that Boseman’s shocking and sudden death at his relatively young age inspired him to get to work on “Sinners” because he feared “it all [would be] taken away.”
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