page_title: Black Panther (film)
section_title: Writing
hierarchical_section_title: Black Panther (film) / Production / Pre-production / Writing
caption_attribution_description: English: Ryan Coogler speaking at the 2016 San Diego Comic-Con International in San Diego, California.
context_page_description: Black Panther is a 2018 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name. Produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, it is the 18th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The film was directed by Ryan Coogler, who co-wrote the screenplay with Joe Robert Cole, and it stars Chadwick Boseman as T'Challa / Black Panther alongside Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman, Daniel Kaluuya, Letitia Wright, Winston Duke, Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker, and Andy Serkis. In Black Panther, T'Challa is crowned king of Wakanda following his father's death, but he is challenged by Killmonger who plans to abandon the country's isolationist policies and begin a global revolution.
  Wesley Snipes expressed interest in working on a Black Panther film in 1992, but the project did not come to fruition. In September 2005, Marvel Studios announced a Black Panther film as one of ten based on Marvel characters and distributed by Paramount Pictures. Mark Bailey was hired to write a script in January 2011.
context_section_description: The production team was inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates' run on Black Panther, who was writing the comic at the same time as they were working on the film. Of particular inspiration was Coates' poetic dialogue, Brian Stelfreeze's art, and "some of the questions that it's asking". The film was also inspired by the comic runs of Jack Kirby, Christopher Priest (which Coogler felt most influenced the film), Jonathan Hickman, and Hudlin. Characters for the film were picked from throughout the comics based on what worked for the film's story. The ceremonial betrothal aspect of the Dora Milaje was not adapted from the comics for the film. Coogler had hoped to include Spider-Man villain Kraven the Hunter early in the process because of a scene in Priest's run that had T'Challa fighting Kraven, but the rights to the character were not available. Donald Glover and his brother Stephen made some minor contributions to an early draft of the script, developing the relationship between T'Challa and his younger sister Shuri. Moore noted that an early script had more scenes outside of Wakanda to explore "what it means to be African and African-American in the world a bit more", and hoped these could be revisited in a later film, particularly a "super cool" sequence that was storyboarded before being cut.
  Feige described Black Panther as "a big geopolitical action adventure" that focuses on family and T'Challa learning to be king, with Civil War laying the groundwork for T'Challa's morality and establishing the geopolitical landscape that he would have to deal with on returning to Wakanda. Moore compared the politics and humor of the film to Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), saying that the former would be inherent but not "preachy", and that the latter would avoid the tones of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and Ant-Man (2015). He also said the film would be a cross between The Godfather (1972) and the James Bond films as a "big, operatic family drama centered around a world of international espionage". Coogler was influenced by 1970s films such as the works of Francis Ford Coppola in that decade, as well as crime fiction. He also watched the film A Prophet (2009) for inspiration. Feige called the film's story "rich in culturally relevant ideas", with Boseman indicating there were parallels to "pull from" in the film in relation to Donald Trump becoming President of the United States after Barack Obama, though Feige added that "these are conversations we were having two years ago because that is inherently the story within the comics." Moore said the film does not depend on the plots of any other MCU films, but it does affect the wider MCU moving forward, with Feige stating the film was "a very important" link to Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019). Civil War did introduce the Wakandan language, based on the Xhosa language, which Boseman was taught by John Kani who portrays T'Challa's father King T'Chaka. Additional actors portraying Wakandans in Black Panther learned the language, with Coogler making the use of the language "a priority... as much as possible". Coogler tried to incorporate Xhosa "in natural and authentic situations", such as when multiple Wakandans were speaking in the presence of nonnatives and wanted to say something they would not understand. John Kani's son Atandwa served as a dialect coach on the film along with his father.
caption: Coogler promoting Black Panther at the 2016 San Diego Comic-Con
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