Black Panther 2's Ryan Coogler shares original plot before Chadwick Boseman's death

Black Panther director Ryan Coogler has revealed that the original plan for the second film had been a completely different story.

In an interview with The New York Times, he discussed what the initial ideas were for Wakanda Forever before the film had to be rewritten following Chadwick Boseman’s tragic passing.

“It was absolutely nothing like what we made,” Coogler said when asked if Boseman’s death had changed the film’s story.

He continued: “It was, ‘What are we going to do about the Blip?’ [which saw T’Challa and others vanished for five years following the events of Infinity War]. It was going to be a father-son story.

“In the script, T’Challa was a dad who’d had this forced five-year absence from his son’s life.”

Related: Black Panther 2 review – is Wakanda Forever any good?

Coogler went on to share the specific plans for the film’s opening scenes, revealing that it was an animated sequence with Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) asking the couple’s son Toussaint what he could remember about his father before T’Challa is brought back from the blip and meets his child for the first time.

“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,” he added.

“Then it cuts ahead three years and he’s essentially co-parenting. We had some crazy scenes in there for Chad, the movie was about a summer that the kid spends with his dad. But something happens and T’Challa has to go save the world with his son on his hip. That was the movie.”