This time around, there were no filmgoers in brightly colored kente cloth outfits or other African garb waiting to greet the coming of the Black Panthers.
Where the first film was a celebration of Black excellence, the sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is an elegy for the late Chadwick Boseman. The mood was somber at theaters in Atlanta, the closest place America has to a Wakanda on Earth (like the original, it was partly filmed here).
The heavy mood doesn’t appear to be slowing traffic at the box office, though. Already, Wakanda Forever made $28m in Thursday previews (beating the 2018 opening-night mark by $3m) and is on pace to rake in between $175m and $200m during its three-day opening weekend, potentially making it the year’s biggest film to date.
Black Panther was one of the highest-grossing movies of all time, zooming to $1.3bn in revenue and becoming the first superhero film to ever receive a best picture nomination at the Oscars. It proved that a film with Black people, by Black people and for Black people could travel around the world, while whetting appetites for Crazy Rich Asians, Parasite and other films that double down on cultural specificity. But not without satisfying dedicated fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
For Angela Dixon, a 26-year-old Marvel devotee, Avengers: Endgame is the high water mark. Wakanda Forever comes close. “I definitely went in thinking it’s gonna be hard to do this without Chadwick Boseman, but I’m gonna give ’em a chance,” she says. “But they did a really great job.”
Reviews for Wakanda Forever have been strong at 84% on Rotten Tomatoes but down from the original’s 96%. Jay Bailey saw an advance screening of the film at Atlanta’s Plaza Theater on Wednesday night and walked away proud all over again. “Ryan and his team did a phenomenal job of bridging us over,” he says. “It’s like I’m on a road trip and I have to make a hard right. But the road going down is now much clearer.”
Black Panther’s director, Ryan Coogler, riding high off the successes of the Rocky postscript Creed and the devastating true-life story Fruitvale Station, pulled off the seemingly impossible two-hander of stuffing 400 years’ worth of Africana studies into a kids’ movie based on a comic book. Wakanda Forever put even more pressure on Coogler to top himself.
“It was a priority for us that we make the film something that could work for audiences as a piece of film-making, as a piece of cinema, as a piece of entertainment,” Coogler told Complex.
But when the 43-year-old Boseman suddenly died of colon cancer in August 2020, Coogler was not only forced to start from scratch, but without the star and close collaborator who had been an indispensable part of Coogler’s original vision for the Black Panther franchise. The original script had been sent to Boseman before his death. “I had just finished it,” Coogler said in an interview. “My last conversation with him was calling him and asking if he wanted to read it before I got notes from the studio. That was the last time we spoke, and he passed maybe a couple of weeks after I finished.”
Ten months later, production was paused after a stunt gone wrong sidelined new lead Letitia Wright, already suffering from negative press for allegedly forgoing Covid vaccines.
“It’s definitely triggering to keep discussing something that’s very close to you and really emotional,” Wright told Variety about a Boseman-less sequel. “But at the same time, we understand the ways in which it could bring healing.”
Wakanda Forever pays tribute to Boseman and T’Challa, giving the actors time to process their grief. All the while the story remains true to the ideals of the original and introduces a whole new world complete with its own hyper-specific culture.
There’s a chance all this heartache and personal devastation will be too much for some audiences – young ones, especially. But Bailey – who, through his startup thinktank the Russell Innovation Center for Entrepreneurs, took more than 1,000 kids to see the original movie – thinks the sequel retained a sense of innocence in spite of all its grief. “There’s still the ships, the man with flying feet,” he says. “There’s still Riri [played by franchise debutante Dominique Thorne] with her flying suit and wonder and curiosity. There’s still enough fantasy.”
