When Chadwick Boseman’s shocking death reverberated worldwide in August 2020, as the earth sat frozen in time amidst a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, the pain was excruciating. A bonafide movie star who had given the world so much was gone almost as quickly as we’d begun to know him. Just two years after the debut of the history-making Black Panther, T’Challa was dead.
While we were able to lean into one another in grief as we absorbed so many other unfairnesses swirling around us, continuing the Black Panther franchise without the Academy Award nominee at the center seemed implausible. For the cast and crew, especially director Ryan Coogler the thought of pressing forward without Boseman was too much to bear. “I was at a point when I was like, I’m walking away from this business,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “I didn’t know if I could make another movie, period, [let alone] another Black Panther movie, because it hurt a lot. I was like, Man, how could I open myself up to feeling like this again?”
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