Black Panther creator Ryan Coogler says Chadwick Boseman ‘wouldn’t have wanted’ films to end with his death

Film’s star Boseman died in August 2020

Black Panther creator Ryan Coogler has spoken out about working on the film’s sequel following the death of Chadwick Boseman.

The actor, who starred in the 2018 Marvel film as T’Challa, died in August 2020, four years after privately being diagnosed with colon cancer. At the time, Coogler was in the middle of writing Black Panther 2.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, the writer and director said that like many of Boseman’s closest colleagues, he “didn’t know what was going on” with the actor’s health and had found the idea of continuing the story “difficult”.

“You’ve got to keep going when you lose loved ones,” Coogler said. “I know Chad wouldn’t have wanted us to stop. He was somebody who was so about the collective. Black Panther, that was his movie.”

He continued: “On that set, he was all about everybody else. Even though he was going through what he was going through, he was checking in on them, making sure they were good.

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“So it would be harder for me to stop. Truthfully. I’d feel him yelling at me, like, ‘What are you doing?’ So you keep going.”

Marvel boss Kevin Feige spoke late last year about how the studio would approach Black Panther 2 in the wake of Boseman’s death, saying that the character of T’Challa would not be recast or digitally re-created.

The film is scheduled to begin shooting this summer, for an expected July 2022 release.