Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was originally a 'father-son story' before Chadwick Boseman's death

Ryan Coogler's original plans for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever looked very different.

Marvel Studios greenlit a Black Panther sequel almost immediately after the first film hit theaters in 2018, and Coogler and screenwriter Joe Robert Cole quickly got to work outlining T'Challa's next adventure. They had just completed the first draft of the script and sent it to Chadwick Boseman, but then the actor died in August 2020 after a private battle with colon cancer. The loss of Boseman radically changed the future of the franchise, and Coogler and Cole rewrote the movie to address his death and focus on T'Challa's sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) instead.

Now, for the first time, Coogler has revealed his initial plot for Wakanda Forever. Coogler and Cole said their first draft would have been a "father-son story" centered on T'Challa and his young son Toussaint in a new interview with The New York Times.

Marvel Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther in 'Avengers: Infinity War'

The director explained that this original version was "absolutely nothing" like the final film, and it would have picked up after T'Challa's five-year disappearance in Avengers: Endgame. While T'Challa was absent, his partner Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o) would have given birth to their son, Toussaint.

"In the script, T'Challa was a dad who'd had this forced five-year absence from his son's life," Coogler told the Times. "The first scene was an animated sequence. You hear Nakia talking to Toussaint. 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."

The script would have then flashed forward three years to trail T'Challa as he co-parents his now 8-year-old son. Namor, the villain played by Tenoch Huerta, would still have been the film's primary antagonist. But Coogler added that he and CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) would have had slightly different roles in the story.

"We had some crazy scenes in there for Chad, man," Coogler said. "Our code name 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."

After Boseman's death, Coogler and Cole reworked the story to chronicle Shuri following in her brother's footsteps as she takes up the mantle of Black Panther. The final cut of the film introduces T'Challa's son Toussaint (played by Divine Love Konadu-Sun) in an end-credits scene as Shuri journeys to Haiti to visit Nakia and meets her nephew for the first time.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is in theaters now.

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• Ryan Coogler almost quit filmmaking after Chadwick Boseman's death

• How the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever end-credits scene teases the future of Wakanda