Chadwick Boseman debuted as T’Challa in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, and less than two years after its release, he reprised the character for his own solo movie. Ryan Coogler directed and co-wrote Black Panther, and the plan had been for Boseman to lead a sequel taking place after T’Challa’s appearances in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. Sadly, the actor passed away in August 2020, resulting in an overhauled Black Panther: Wakanda Forever making its way to the big screen in November 2022. Coogler has now shared how difficult it was for him dealing with the “complicated grief” of losing Boseman as he was putting the sequel together.
Coogler is currently making the rounds to promote his 2025 movie release Sinners, but naturally his past movies are also being discussed as he’s doing press, including Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. In an interview with The Guardian, the filmmaker shared how working on the sequel actually helped for a time as he and the cast and crew as they grappled with Boseman’s death, with Coogler saying:
Sometimes it’s actually a relief having something to do, so you can’t sit in that terrible feeling … After we put the movie out, my heart broke almost even more, because I realised all the work had been distracting me from the fact that Chad’s not going to make any more movies.
It was revealed after Chadwick Boseman’s passing that he’d been suffering from stage III colon cancer since 2016, and only a few non-family members knew about his condition. So with Ryan Coogler unaware of what was happening, he went about writing the Black Panther 2 script with T’Challa still front and center. During his last conversation with Boseman, he asked the actor if he wanted to read his finished script before he got notes from Marvel Studios. Boseman died a few weeks later.
As a result, Letitia Wright’s Shuri became Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s new leading hero, and like its predecessor, the sequel was also a critical and commercial success. But like Ryan Coogler explained, finishing Wakanda Forever also required him to deal with the reality that we wouldn’t see any more Boseman-led movies. Da 5 Bloods was the final movie he appeared in prior to his death, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was posthumously released in November 2020.
In a better world, we would have seen Chadwick Boseman impress on the silver screen for many more decades, and maybe Ryan Coogler might’ve directed some of them. I can’t imagine how painful it was for him to learn about his friend’s death and come to terms with that. Coogler also recently shared that of the people who starred in Black Panther, Sinners lead Michael B. Jordan was hit the hardest by Boseman’s passing.
Feel free to revisit Chadwick Boseman’s time as Black Panther by streaming his MCU appearances with your Disney+ subscription. That includes his vocal performance as an alternate universe T’Challa in several What If… ? Season 1 episodes, which came out in 2021.
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