Unless something very unexpected happens, Letitia Wright’s Shuri will end Black Panther: Wakanda Forever as the latest incumbent of the titular mantle, stepping in for her brother T’Challa just as she did in the comic books.
Of course, we’ll never know if that was always going to be the plan eventually within the context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but the passing of star Chadwick Boseman and the desire on the part of director Ryan Coogler and his team to continue the story kicked off in the game-changing original ensured that the sequel at least had source material to rely on.
While Shuri’s journey could be dictated by grief, fury, vengeance, or any other emotion that comes from trying to process the death of her onscreen brother while dealing with a war being waged by Namor and his forces, Coogler revealed to ScreenRant that she’ll be powered by something else entirely.
“[There are] many themes in this movie. I don’t want to get into all of them because that would suck, but one thing we would talk about is this idea [that] in the first Panther film, there was a big conversation around innovation and tradition. There were traditionalists and there were innovators. In this one, we tried to be less focused on that concept, even though that’s still there.
But in this one, I really thought about this concept of intelligence versus wisdom, what it means to be smart versus what it means to be wise, and which one wins when those things come into contact with each other. And there’s something to be said for wisdom. Wisdom comes with a life lived, and Namor is a character who’s very old in a human sense. He’s been alive a long time, so he’s very wise. Shuri comes into contact with this guy who’s much older than he looks, and she’s used to being smarter than everybody she’s around. And maybe you could argue that she is smarter than Namor, but she’s not wiser than him.
Wisdom is a powerful thing. She’s also dealing with wisdom from her mother, and I think that made the film very interesting. And that’s a big difference between them. Namor’s lived a lot more life than she has and has been less protected than she has been. Talokan is, in many ways, more exposed than Wakanda is, even though the world knows about Wakanda. It’s this idea of vulnerability and what that can mean.”
Coogler makes an excellent point; Shuri might be arguably the single smartest character in the MCU, but that doesn’t mean she’s anywhere close to being the wisest. That’s all going to change as she learns on the job, though, and we can’t wait to see how it pans out when Black Panther: Wakanda Forever finally hits theaters next week.