Black Panther producer says Marvel won't make a digital Chadwick Boseman for the sequel

When Carrie Fisher died in 2016, Lucasfilm was left with no idea of what to do with the then-upcoming Star Wars: Episode IX. Production hadn’t really started on it at that point, and Colin Trevorrow hadn’t even been replaced as the director yet, but he and the studio were having meetings as soon as days after she died to try and figure out what to do, since Fisher’s Leia was supposed to be a big part of the final film in the sequel trilogy. The choice at the time was basically to either recreate Leia with computers, as Rogue One had recently done with Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin, or find a way to rewrite the movie and acknowledge that something had happened to Leia/Fisher in-between films. Ultimately, Lucasfilm and director J.J. Abrams (who replaced Trevorrrow on what became The Rise Of Skywalker) landed on some amalgamation of the two, recycling old footage of Fisher in a way that was—unintentionally, one would hope—a disservice to both the character and the legendary woman who played her.

For Black Panther 2, Marvel seems intent on avoiding a similar misstep. Speaking with Argentine newspaper Clarín (translated, via Deadline), Black Panther executive producer Victoria Alonso denied rumors that Chadwick Boseman would be digitally recreated so he could appear in a Black Panther sequel, saying, “No. There’s only one Chadwick, and he’s no longer with us.” She went on to say that, since “our king has died in real life,” Marvel is going to be “taking a little time to see how we continue the story” and how to honor Boseman and his tragic, unexpected death.

The last time we heard anything about Black Panther 2 was when Boseman died and director Ryan Coogler said he had spent the last year writing lines for Boseman that “we weren’t destined to see,” but before that it was October of 2018 when we heard that Marvel was officially moving forward with Coogler on Black Panther 2. That means, even before Boseman’s death, Marvel wasn’t rushing to get another Black Panther movie out the door, which also hopefully supports Alonso’s claim that the studio isn’t going to do anything ill-advised with this like Lucasfilm did. Deadline says Black Panther 2 is still scheduled to start filming in 2021 for release in 2022, but Marvel sticking with that seems unlikely.