Trivia / Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

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• Acting in the Dark: Angela Bassett was unaware of Queen Ramonda's ultimate fate until she got to the page in the script that revealed her death, meaning she portrayed Ramonda as though she would survive the film's events.
• Actor-Inspired Element:
  • Actors Alex Livinalli, Tenoch Huerta, and Mabel Cadena describe how they wanted Namor and his people (and their fans) to have an equivalent to the Black Panther's "Wakanda forever!" salute. Therefore, taking inspiration from the Yucatecan Maya spoken in the film, and a common greeting gesture depicted throughout various Mesoamerican codices, they came up with "Liik'ik Talocan!" (Rise, Talokan!) with the aforementioned greeting. Which, Huerta admits, is actually associated with the Sun.
  • Michael B. Jordan made the decision to put Killmonger's hair up when Shuri meets him on the Ancestral Plane, as he wanted it to look like Ramonda's hat to further add to the shock of the character's appearance.
• Approval of God: Robert Downey Jr. has had nothing but positive things to say about Dominique Thorne's portrayal of Ironheart, noting how important the character was and how distinct she is compared to Iron Man.
• Awesome, Dear Boy:
  • Mabel Cadena was rather enthusiastic to portray Namora in this movie, as she saw it as a great opportunity to represent Mexican women in a blockbuster, and to challenge the stereotypes associated with them.
  • Rihanna immediately wanted to get involved with Wakanda Forever from the moment she saw the first trailer, and recorded the song "Lift Me Up" as a personal tribute to Chadwick Boseman.
  • Tenoch Huerta got a call from Ryan Coogler, but his Internet connection cut off while Ryan was explaining, and when the connection was restored, he said "yes" despite knowing nothing of his role or the main plot.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Dominique Thorne initially auditioned to play Shuri back in the first Black Panther movie, and even did a screentest with Chadwick Boseman. She now gets to play Ironheart in this film instead.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: In the Italian dub, the famous Senegalese-Italian Tiktoker Khaby Lame did random, unspecified roles in the film.
• The Character Died with Him: Due to Chadwick Boseman's untimely passing in 2020, Marvel Studios decided not to recast T'Challa. As a result, the opening scene depicts the character dying offscreen from an undisclosed disease.
• Content Leak: Before it was officially announced, there were reports and leaks of Namor appearing in the film, including naming Tenoch Huerta as the actor playing him and that his culture would evoke the Mayan civilization. Both Attuma and Namora were also leaked on merchandise images before they were unveiled in the teaser.
• Creator Backlash: Angela Bassett initially objected to Queen Ramonda's death in this film, as she was worried that such an event would severely upset audiences. She eventually came around to the idea after Ryan Coogler reminded of how frequently characters come Back from the Dead in the MCU, particularly where Avengers: Endgame was involved.
• Creator Breakdown: Everyone involved with this film struggled with trying to soldier on without Chadwick Boseman's presence, which made the incorporation of T'Challa's death into the story all the more morose and painful for everyone. Per Winston Duke's words, there were moments where the cast had to come together to support each other when the grief just got to be too much for each other.
• Died During Production:
  • Chadwick Boseman passed away from colorectal cancer during pre-production, forcing T'Challa to be written off as also dying at the beginning of the movie.
  • Dorothy Steel passed away at the age of 95 while reprising her role as the Merchant Tribe Elder. Steel told her publicist she knew it would be her final role, and Marvel flew her back to her home city so she could pass away at home with her family.
• Doing It for the Art: As noted above, Dorothy Steel knew that her health was in decline when the time came to reprise her role as the Merchant Tribe Elder, and knew it would be her final film. She nonetheless participated in the film’s production until she knew without a doubt her time was up, knowing how important the Black Panther films are to people worldwide. This was especially noble considering the pandemic was still in full swing during filming, meaning Steel was even more at risk of contracting COVID-19 even after vaccines had become available.
• Dueling Works:
  • With Avatar: The Way of Water, both being late 2022 long-awaited sequels that up the ante by taking things into an aquatic environment, coincidentally involving blue-skinned people in tribal outfits. Amusingly, they both come from Disney-owned studios.
  • With Black Adam, due to the fact both films are releasing a few weeks apart from each other and are set in rival franchises. They also both focus on grand fictional cities in Africa, feature a wide range of supporting characters, and are both centered around violent, anti-heroic characters ruling over said fictional cities while being revered as living gods.
• Dyeing for Your Art: Alex Livinalli gained roughly 30 lbs to portray Attuma's intimidating size.
• In Memoriam:
  • Unsurprisingly, the CBB gives a heartfelt dedication to the late Chadwick Boseman. The opening Marvel Studios intro sequence is also the one Marvel created for the first film's Disney+ release, installed on Boseman's first birthday after his passing, and is played in near-silence.
  • At the very end of the credits there is a dedication to Dorothy Steel (who played the Merchant Tribe Elder), Gilda Longoria and AJ Crimson (two members of the film crew), and Winston Duke's mother Cora Pantin.
• Irony as She Is Cast:
  • Despite being cast as Namor the Sub-Mariner, who is known for being king of an underwater kingdom, Tenoch Huerta didn't know how to swim when he was first cast in the role. He had to take eight months of swimming lessons to prepare for this film.
  • Letitia Wright, a devout Christian, plays a character who is skeptical of believing in the deity Bast or the existence of an afterlife.
  • In a deleted scene, Everett Ross puts on an over-the-top English accent when impersonating an MI6 agent to retrieve some intel for Wakanda. His actor, Martin Freeman is British in real life.
• Kids' Meal Toy: Received ten figures at McDonald's, as well as special Happy Meal boxes.
• Late Export for You: The film was released in China on February 7, 2023, 3 months after it's US release date of November 11, 2022. Notably, this was the first MCU film to have been released in China since Spider-Man: Far From Home, after the other Phase 4 films were denied chinese releases for various reasons.
• Multiple Languages, Same Voice Actor: The Mexican-born Tenoch Huerta reprised his role as Namor for the film's Latin American Spanish dub.
• Promoted Fanboy: The new cast members were all deeply honored and excited to work on the film and with the cast, crew and director. Alex Livinalli noted he was also a massive fan of Danai Gurira for her work in The Walking Dead^note On which he also made a brief guest appearance, albeit in the episode immediately after Gurira left the series and was excited to share most of his screen-time with her.
• Reality Subtext:
  • The fact that T'Challa was Secretly Dying of a disease and didn't tell anyone besides Nakia and Toussaint until it was too late bringing to mind similar circumstances with Chadwick Boseman, who elected to not make public his cancer diagnosis, the world beyond his immediate family instead only learning about it upon his death.
  • Most of the cast was devastated by the decision to kill off Ramonda. Letitia Wright called Ryan Coogler to cry and vent out her despair over losing her character's fictional mother.
  • On a lighter note, production designer Hannah Beachler comments in Assembled: The Making of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever that Ryan Coogler is a “very smart man surrounded by women heads of departments.” An apt description for T’Challa as well.
• Refitted for Sequel:
  • There were talks of including Namor as a member of the Illuminati in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness since he was a member of the team's comics version. The idea was dropped due to Marvel having other plans for Namor, presumably them being his involvement in this film.
  • The final shot of T'Challa in the closing montage of him is in fact a clip that went unused in the first film.
• Release Date Change: The film was originally slated to release on May 6, 2022, and notably kept that release date even with the COVID-19 Pandemic delaying other MCU films and this film's production. However, after the sudden death of Chadwick Boseman, the film was pushed back to July 8, 2022, owing to the script being entirely rewritten from scratch in order to write T'Challa out of the MCU. Lastly, it was pushed to November 11, 2022, due to a number of factors, including Letitia Wright severely injuring herself, the arrival of COVID-19's Omicron variant, and Wright refusing to be vaccinated against the virus.
• Spoiled by the Merchandise:
  • A product listing spoils Shuri outfitted with a Black Panther suit, which has otherwise been a very guarded secret prior to the film's release. This was followed up by another set revealing Shuri wearing a much more obvious Black Panther suit.
  • The blurb for the Marvel Legends figures already showed that rather than ruling Atlantis, Namor instead comes from a civilization called Talokan.
• Throw It In!: Winston Duke improvised M'Baku making fun of Okoye with "You baldheaded demon!" in the film.
• Troubled Production: Oh, boy, where do we even start?
  • Development for a sequel was in motion after the success of the first movie and started in Summer 2019 and filming was going to start in early to mid-2020, but the COVID-19 Pandemic resulted in production getting delayed (although the film's initial release date was kept).
  • Chadwick Boseman's untimely passing in August 2020 resulted in the script having to be entirely re-written five times from the ground up to accommodate the character's subsequent death In-Universe, resulting in the film being delayed.
  • To make matters worse, Letitia Wright would later get severely injured at some point on set, and had to recover for several months.
  • Dorothy Steel passed away while filming her scenes reprising her role as the Merchant Tribe Elder, leaving it unknown at this time how much of her role she was unable to complete.
  • Some members of the film crew, including Lupita Nyong'o, contracted the Omicron variant of COVID-19 in January 2022. Thankfully, this did not deter its final release date.
  • And near the end of the film's production, director Ryan Coogler was arrested during filming in Atlanta after being mistaken for a bank robber. However, this didn't cause a big dent in production as he was shortly released later, and the tumultuous production was finally finished in Puerto Rico a few weeks later.
  • Unlike Aquaman, where most of the underwater scenes were filmed on dry land with special effects, all of the Talokan scenes were actually filmed underwater.^note Whenever characters spoke, the actors simply mouthed their lines, which were later dubbed. This provided its own unique challenges:
    • First, very few of the principal actors knew how to swim. Even the ones that did were still not accustomed to acting underwater. Ryan Coogler also realized that he too would have to learn to swim in order to properly direct the underwater scenes. Swimming lessons for the cast and necessary production crew took months.
    • The costume and set designs were initially done with conventional materials, which didn't quite work underwater: concrete set pieces had tiny air pockets that were constantly releasing bubbles, costumes would deteriorate in the water, etc. The crew had to exclusively use waterproof materials.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The entire first draft of the film is a major example of this, given the fact T'Challa was originally meant to be the lead before Chadwick Boseman's tragic passing.
    • According to Coogler, it would've focused on T'Challa grieving the five years he lost from his life as a victim of the Snap. T'Challa would have returned from the Blip to meet his son for the first time, only to find that Nakia had married a Haitian man in his absence. T'Challa would’ve been co-parenting Toussaint with the boy’s adopted father. There was also going to be more focus on Toussaint's interpretation of the U.S-Wakandan-Talokan conflict.
    • There was a scene planned where T'Challa and Toussaint would celebrate the latter's eighth birthday by going camping in the bush and surviving off the land. The movie's conflict would start when something happens that forces T'Challa to save the world while still trying to take care of his son.
    • Ultimately, Toussaint's involvement was greatly reduced after Chadwick Boseman's death.
    • Coogler further revealed that he intended for Boseman to look over the script to get feedback on it, but sadly Boseman was too tired due to being in the last weeks of his life when asked to review the script by Coogler.
  • According to Ryan Coogler, Namor and his people were initially intended to come from Atlantis as in the comics, but the release of DC's Aquaman movie motivated them to go in a different direction, eventually leading to the creation of Talokan.
  • Namor was meant to make his cinematic debut in his own standalone film, which instead fell into Development Hell due to rights issues (presumably due to the fact his film rights are technically owned by Universal Studios). Michael Waldron also attempted to include Namor as part of the Earth-838's Illuminati line-up in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but Marvel Studios turned down his idea due to having plans for the character, presumably his appearance in this film.
  • Daniel Kaluuya was supposed to return as W'Kabi from the previous film but dropped out due to scheduling conflicts with Nope.
  • Ryan Coogler nearly stepped back from this movie and filmmaking as a whole after Chadwick Boseman's death, due to how emotionally painful it was losing his friend. However, after taking his final conversations with the man into consideration, Coogler decided that it was best to keep moving forward with the project.
  • Wakanda Forever was originally going to be the subtitle of the third Black Panther solo film, with several other titles (such as "Kingdom of the Deep") considered for this sequel instead. Ultimately, Marvel decided to go with Wakanda Forever for the second film, as they felt it was more "thematically appropriate" for the subject matter.
  • Nakia and M'Baku were considered to take up the mantle of Black Panther during this film rather than Shuri as in the final product. The film's ending does have M'Baku challenge for leadership on Shuri's behalf however.
  • The faceplate on the Ironheart armor was originally supposed to be able to turn transparent, allowing Riri's face to be seen inside. This was changed to the typical in-helmet HUD design previously seen with Iron Man and War Machine for logistical reasons.
  • The U.S government subplot regarding Everett Ross and Valentina Allegra de Fontaine was much bigger and more involved in earlier drafts of the movie, but it had to be reduced to prevent the script from getting too long, and to make room for the characters to grieve T'Challa's passing.
  • There was also a scene shot where Everett Ross retrieves some intel on behalf of Wakanda by impersonating an MI6 agent, which presumably tied into the above subplot.
  • Concept art shows that Ironheart and Namora's fight against each other was originally going to take place in an underwater oil rig rather than in the air.
  • Marvel Studios was planning for both T'Challa and Shuri to simultaneously have the mantle of Black Panther in the MCU.
  • On the other hand, Namor kidnapping Shuri was present even in the very first script.
  • From an earlier draft of the script, one written after Boseman's death:
    • Shuri is a lot more openly resentful of Nakia for the latter missing T’Challa’s funeral.
    • Shuri and Riri would've helped repair Talokan's Vibranium sun.
    • The Foe Romantic Subtext between Shuri and Namor is simply text, particularly on his side.
    • Shuri would've nearly committed suicide after Ramonda's death, being stopped by Nakia and Okoye.
    • The Elders would've had a larger role, squabbling more over what to do regarding Namor. M'Kathu, the Border Tribe Elder, also would've been more at odds with the other Elders thanks to the Border Tribe's betrayal in the previous film, and he would've encouraged Okoye to challenge for the throne after Ramonda's death.
• You Look Familiar:
  • Lake Bell, who had previously voiced Natasha Romanoff in What If...? appears as Dr. Graham, one of the American scavengers who gets killed by Namor when trying to find Vibranium in the ocean early in the film.
  • In the Japanese dub, Saori Hayami (Ironheart) and Daisuke Namikawa (Namor) had previous roles in the MCU's dubs, mainly in films starring Spider-Man: Hayami previously voiced the E.D.I.T.H. suit in Spider-Man: Far From Home and Namikawa previously voiced Jason Ionello in Spider-Man: Homecoming.

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