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Google PlaySpoilers for ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ below.
When we are at our lowest point, we’re susceptible to the most change. This was the crossroads that every fictional character and real-world actor faced in Marvel’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Going into the film, director Ryan Coogler was tasked with the impossible: to somehow make a sudden tragedy make sense on the silver screen while simultaneously grappling with it in his own personal life. The result is one of the most grounded superhero films in recent years that reminds viewers how nothing that is lost is truly gone forever.
The film opens by answering one of the biggest questions viewers had going into the film, how would the movie address Chadwick Boseman’s passing. Coogler and Marvel dealt with the difficult situation in the most tasteful-yet-painful way possible, by having T’Challa pass away in a similar fashion as the actor—from the onset of a sudden illness.
“In my culture, death is not the end. It’s more of a stepping-off point,” the late Chadwick Boseman, a.k.a. King T’Challa, says in Captain America: Civil War after his father’s murder. “You reach out with both hands and Bast and Sekhmet, they lead you into a green veld where you can run forever.”
