Black Panther Wakanda Forever – Blue Towel Productions

Recently, the MCU expanded to reach it’s 30th film–Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Though this is the second Black Panther movie in the MCU, a lot has happened in the MCU since the character’s first feature-film starring role back in 2018–both fictionally and in real life. The lead character died for five years of fictional time (along with the half of the rest of the MCU), and then returned to life in time to help defeat the big bad of the day, Thanos. But then, tragically, starring actor Chadwick Boseman died of cancer at the young age of 43, something which took almost everyone outside of the man’s inner circle by surprise.

In response to this, Marvel and Ryan Coogler opted to continue with the Black Panther sequel without recasting the role of King T’Challa or relying on recent CGI technology to re-create the actor’s presence in the film. The result is a movie which deals head on with the emotions related to grief and death, and explores the impact of what it means to have lost a beloved brother, son and king. It’s in this emotional space that the film is the most successful, and we really get a story that is quite unique amongst all the others that the MCU has brought to the big screen, and that is genuinely worth telling.