Ryan Coogler explains what the Black Panther sequel would have looked like with Chadwick Boseman

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is nearly upon us, and the film promises to be an experience of collective mourning for deceased star Chadwick Boseman. But before the actor passed away from colon cancer in August 2020, writer-director Ryan Coogler was working on a version of the sequel with T’Challa in it—and apparently, it wasn’t too far off from the final product.

“The tone was going to be similar,” Coogler tells Inverse, revealing that the Marvel Cinematic Universe “Blip” (the five-year period after Thanos’ snap wherein half of all life disappeared) played a major role in the plot. “The character was going to be grieving the loss of time, you know, coming back after being gone for five years.”

“As a man with so much responsibility to so many, coming back after a forced five years absence, that’s what the film was tackling,” the director continues. “He was grieving time he couldn’t get back. Grief was a big part of it.”

Coogler says Namor (played by Tenoch Huerta) “was always the antagonist,” but after Boseman’s death, the script was reworked to be a more literal interpretation of grief. Though the filmmaker’s vision very nearly never came to fruition: he previously admitted he almost left Hollywood after losing Boseman but decided to move forward because of the actor’s own words. “I was poring over a lot of our conversations that we had, towards what I realized was the end of his life. I decided that it made more sense to keep going,” he told Entertainment Weekly.

“Who the protagonist was, the flaws of the protagonist, what the protagonist was dealing with in their journey, all of that stuff had to be different due to us losing him and the decisions that we made about moving forward,” he explains to Inverse. But in many ways, the end result of Wakanda Forever is still a product of Coogler’s artistic partnership with Boseman, a legacy that is sure to have a lasting impact.