Since the tragic passing of Chadwick Boseman in 2020, fans of the actor and his performance as the MCU’s iteration of T’Challa (AKA, Black Panther) have been waiting with bated breath in nervous anticipation of how this would affect the character and the larger franchise going forward. Would T’Challa be recast? Would Marvel produce a digitally-created version of Boseman, as seen with Peter Cushing in Rogue One: A Star War Story? Thankfully, neither of these arguably distasteful choices was taken, and instead, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever begins with the off-screen passing of T’Challa having succumbed to an unspecified illness, one that we see his sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) desperately trying to cure, only to be told by their mother Ramonda (Angela Bassett) that she is too late.
This opening scene is devastating in its abruptness. It’s heartbreaking – I’m not ashamed to say that I shed a tear (more for the actor himself than the character, as I would at several other points in the film). The sequence fades into a revised version of the familiar Marvel Studios logo animation that, instead of featuring the franchise’s entire roster of characters, acts as a silent tribute (omitting the now famous fanfare of the Avengers theme) to the late Boseman. For a Marvel film, Wakanda Forever, due more to the real-world tragedy of Boseman’s early death, marks a notable departure for a franchise and an approach to genre filmmaking that has been predominantly sold upon its ability to offer an escape from the harsher facets of everyday life.
Yes – we have seen characters die before. We have seen the likes of (spoiler-alert, but come-on, you know this already) Tony Stark, Quicksilver, Groot and Natasha ‘Black Widow’ Romanov succumb to their foes or sacrifice themselves for the greater good. But never before has the franchise had to contend with the real-world loss of one of its major stars, one that set a new and important precedent for black representation on-screen back in 2018, particularly within the superhero genre. The reaction of characters to the loss of Tony Stark at the end of Avengers: Endgame, or Spider-man: Far From Home are poignant moments of reflection upon the character and his importance within the greater narrative being told – but we are only mourning the loss Stark, not Downey Jr. We are aware, as well, of the potential for Downey Jr./Stark to make a comeback at some point down the road – a comic book twist built upon these stories’ fundamental rule that no character ever truly dies – there’s always the possibility, perhaps the inevitability, that we’ll see them again.
The loss of Boseman means that this time, things are different. The MCU’s version of T’Challa is gone, and he isn’t coming back. This is what makes Wakanda Forever so impactful, but simultaneously, very difficult to fully process. We’re unable to reconcile the film with the kind of storytelling and tone we expect from a Marvel film. It feels sombre, reflective and melancholy in a manner that the real-world context unforuntately makes all the more devastating. Director Ryan Coogler has commendably tried to fill in the gap left by Boseman and the film is, I personally think, a fitting tribute to the late star and his career-defining performance. In fact, Wakanda Forever is primarily built upon performance rather than narrative, with the lines between Wright’s, Bassett’s and Lupita Nyong’o’s in-character emotional response and their real-world grieving for their former co-star, being painfully but unsurprisingly blurred.
This is a film about the loss of its star just as much as it is about the loss of a character. The fact that this plays out within a superhero-genre vehicle, a kind of cinema-going experience we tend to go to for escapism and comfort, makes Wakanda Forever exponentially more complex. For many, this might make the film a difficult, even impossible watch, asking its audience to confront mortality in a very visceral and often uncomfortable way. Critics have identified the same strand of complexity in their reviews but ultimately this is a film – perhaps the film – that Marvel needed to make and that their audience needed to see.
Notes from the Multiplex 