Needless to say, Black Panther set the bar pretty high considering that it became the first MCU movie to earn an Oscar nomination and afforded the MCU a trip to the podium. But whether or not Black Panther 2 is going to be able to do the same is up in the air at the moment as Ryan Scott from MovieWeb has made it clear that we shouldn’t be expecting part 2 within the next year. Given the aspirations and lengthy strides that have been taken to bring more and more heroes into the mix Black Panther won’t even begin shooting until around 2021 it would seem, meaning that fans will have to wait around until 2022 to see Chadwick Boseman return to the role of the iconic king of Wakanda. It’s very true that people were duly impressed with Black Panther in a big way since he’s the first black superhero to enter the Marvel universe and turned out to be one of the most impressive, but folks tend to forget that he wasn’t the first black hero to reach the big screen, which is a talking point that warrants some attention as Justin Charity from The Ringer would agree with since Wesley Snipes could take that honor for introducing Blade, another Marvel hero that came after T’Challa but at the same time wasn’t nearly as well-known.
Plus, back in the 90s the MCU hadn’t formed yet and Marvel movies still weren’t their own entity, so it’s quite easy to overlook Blade as anything but another vampire story that happened to be based off of a Marvel comic. That’s too bad really since the first Blade was enjoyable even if the next two movies weren’t that great. Black Panther hopefully won’t fall into that same trap since sequels have a nasty habit of falling well short of the first movies goals too often. It’s been a cinematic reality for decades now, one that only a select few sequels have ever managed to push past, and in this case the Marvel universe is not an exception thus far. Let’s face it, from Avengers: The Age of Ultron to Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and especially Thor: The Dark World, the sequels haven’t been so horrible that people didn’t want to see them, but they’ve fallen far short of the first movies, prompting a third and understandably epic showing that had to wow the fans to bring them back.
There’s talk of bringing Killmonger back as per Nick Evans of CinemaBlend, though at this point in the MCU it’s kind of hard to think of how feasible this could be since in the comics this kind of literary magic might be all well and good, but in the movies it’s likely to upset a few fans and force them to cry foul. Unless there’s some insane level of reasoning that can be brought to bear on the subject a lot of people are starting to value realism in the movies, even those that are more fantastical and stretch the boundaries of reality on a constant basis. Bringing back characters that were killed off seems less appealing these days as it means that there’s a hidden switch somewhere behind the scenes that can be tripped to bring back favorite characters so as to spare the sensibilities of the audience. In this case though it would be a mistake that the studio can’t afford to make unless they can provide a rock-solid plot line that would bring the villain back and make him even more of a threat to T’Challa than he was in the first movie. Bringing villains back to life does pose a constant and very real danger for the hero that can be appreciated, but at the same time it seems to imply that their troubles have no end, and that their enemies are going to be able to hit the reset button anytime the plot starts to wear thin. Black Panther has more than a few enemies, especially given that he’s interacted with the Avengers at this point and taken on their troubles as well.
Also, given that T’Challa has decided to reveal Wakanda to the world, there’s bound to be no shortage of enemies that will spring out of the woodwork, and fending them all off, the worst of them at least, could lead to another Avengers story arc if one were to be completely honest. With the ranks of the Avengers likely to expand and possibly take on a new look it seems fair to say that Wakanda would eventually fall under their protection. It might seem as though the nation can take care of itself, but given that the Avengers are still above and beyond in terms of skill, power, and ability, it would seem wise for T’Challa to at least consider that his new allies could help out on occasion. The next few years should be interesting.
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