As the characters, led by Letitia Wright’s Shuri, the princess of Wakanda who is T’Challa’s younger sister, proceed to mourn T’Challa’s death, they tap deeply into our collective feelings about Boseman. Teaming up again with co-screenwriter Joe Robert Cole, the filmmaker has woven the demise of his leading man into the very firmament of his story. Yet what Coogler has done instead in “ Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” carries its own high-wire audacity. ![]() You don’t try to replace someone who’s irreplaceable. His decision not to replace Boseman with a different actor was wise. When Ryan Coogler, the director and co-writer of “Black Panther,” agreed to go ahead in making the sequel after Boseman’s death (for a while he says he considered stepping away), he knew that the already daunting challenge of creating a movie that could live up to the first film had multiplied exponentially. The film marked a paradigm shift: a long-overdue leveling of the blockbuster playing field, and a celebration (through its extraordinary success) of the fact that a Black superhero could now stand astride the world. “Black Panther” was a very good Marvel movie that was also grander than that. And, of course, we’d lost the anchor of the rare comic-book franchise that really meant something. ![]() We’d lost the rare sublime screen star who was also a culture hero - his slyly playful and forceful performance as T’Challa, the Wakanda-king-turned-leonine-superhero of “ Black Panther,” made Boseman a mythic presence in pop culture, revered around the globe as a larger-than-life figure who was also a winningly down-to-earth icon of Black fortitude and nobility. We had lost an actor who, after “Get on Up” and “42” and “Da 5 Bloods,” was arguably on his way to becoming the greatest actor of his generation. When Chadwick Boseman passed away in August 2020, the tragedy of his death felt wrenchingly multi-layered.
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