Black Panther’s box office success in 2018 was groundbreaking; Marvel Studios ten-years-too-late decision to produce a Black led comic book blockbuster paid dividends — skyrocketing the film into the top fifteen lifetime grosses worldwide and earned the film a hotly debated nomination for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Disney was rubbing their hands together in anticipation of the sequel’s success not long afterwards, but the sudden passing of lead Chadwick Boseman age forty-four cast a shadow over the thought of the next film.
The praise Black Panther received, unusually high for a Marvel flick, has been attributed in large part to the talent of the man behind the camera: Ryan Coogler, an African-American filmmaker known for his directorial debut, Fruitvale Station (2013), and his Rocky-spinoff Creed (2015). Coogler directed and co-wrote the first Black Panther film, and he sent Boseman a script for the sequel just weeks Boseman passed away. His next draft of the script would, by necessity, have a new protagonist and plot.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever opens with a prologue that tackles T’Challa’s (Boseman) in-universe passing as tastefully as possible. We watch a beautiful funeral procession filled with Wakandan customs, dance, and song. The emotion is real, and the environment immerse. Until, that is, the procession ends, and we see blue-sky-beam raise T’Challa’s coffin into the sky below a hovering CGI aircraft where it is swallowed inside the ship and carried away. For the rest of the runtime, it’s difficult not to see this scene as the epitome of the entire sequel: Coogler’s careful, contained, and truthful storytelling sequences callously consumed by the MCU engine.
Across Wakanda Forever’s almost three-hour runtime, Coogler’s A-story carves out just enough space — between the B-story that functions less as a development of Dominique Throne’s character and more as a backdoor pilot for Ironheart (Coming Soon to Disney+) and the C-story which ultimately amounts to Martin Freeman and Julia Louis-Dreyfus needlessly riffing on the main plot — to explore themes of grief on a blockbuster-scale. The third act contains a scene where a character reminisces about T’Challa and a montage of footage of Boseman in the first film appears on screen. It is a moment that raises a question: is this a film more interested in Coogler exploring themes of grief or Disney exploiting a grieving audience? The question is up for debate, but the stirring the present box-office success of Wakanda Forever far is not. At the very least, Coogler's work has paved the way for more Black led ensemble action films in the future.