After directing Black Panther in 2018, Ryan Coogler returned to direct the follow-up to the Marvel movie, which would become 2022’s Black Panther 2. Speaking on The Official Black Panther Podcast Coogler opened up about his early vision for the sequel.
“I knew I wanted to make another one and when I was doing my deep dive, you know, all these stories, there were a few characters [T’Challa] would interact with, I thought, ‘This would be awesome. knew I wanted to make another one and when I was doing my deep dive, you know, all these stories, there were a few characters he would interact with, I thought, ‘This would be awesome.'”
He added, “I was always excited to come back knowing what it was. And that excited me quite a bit and the second script, it was like a T’Challa vehicle. It was like, ‘Okay, we set the world up. Now, we’re gonna do the deepest dive into this guy that you could imagine.’ And that was what excited me even more, ’cause I knew Chad better as a performer and… I knew him better as a guy. So I felt like I had a better [handle] on T’Challa as a character after making the first film.”
On the podcast, Coogler also revealed that two weeks prior to Chadwick Boseman’s passing in August 2020, he had already finished the script for the superhero movie sequel.
“I just finished it, man,” he said. “My last conversation [with Chadwick] was calling him, asking him if he wanted to read it before I got notes from the studio. That was the last time we spoke. And yeah, so I, you know, he passed maybe a couple weeks after I finished.”
No words. Just listen.
Ryan Coogler tells host Ta-Nehisi Coates about his last phone call with Chadwick Boseman.
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“He talked about how they were planning their wedding in South Carolina. And how many people he was going to invite… And he asked about my kid, ’cause he had missed our baby shower. And then he was like, yeah, he said he didn’t wanna read it ’cause he didn’t wanna get in the way of whatever notes the studio might have. So he was like, ‘It’s better if I can read it later.’ But I found later that he was too tired to read anything.”
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever will be released theatrically on November 8, 2022.