A small but ardent group of Black Panther fans are continuing to call for Marvel to recast the title role after Chadwick Boseman’s unexpected death, but others are wary of the motivations behind the #RecastTChalla movement.
The trailer for the movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which comes out on Nov. 11, has confirmed what most of us figured: Boseman’s T’Challa has been killed off. The film will follow as the nation of Wakanda, still reeling from the death of its king, fends off an invasion and crowns a new Black Panther.
For some, it was a painful reminder that T’Challa’s short reign as the only Black superhero lead in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has officially come to a premature end.
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Jamie Broadnax was at San Diego Comic-Con when the trailer dropped over the weekend. She pulled out her phone and rushed to Twitter to update her followers on the news.
“When I live-tweeted it, I did see some of the comments in response to the trailer,” she told The Daily Beast. “People were upset that the recasting wasn’t happening.”
Shortly after the trailer was released online, the hashtag #RecastTChalla started trending. Some asked the studio to reconsider killing off the character, while others accused them of simply not wanting to see a woman—either T’Challa’s love interest Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) or his sister Shuri (Letitia Wright)—assume the mantle of the late king.
This non-canonical casting call is not new. Black Panther was a massive movie event that proved audiences are eager for Black superhero films, especially good ones. It broke box office records and became the first superhero movie to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. In August 2020, Boseman died after a private battle with colon cancer that started back in 2016, leading longtime Marvel buffs and recent converts to wonder about the future of the franchise without its charismatic lead.
Boseman had become synonymous with T’Challa after playing him in other Marvel properties, including the Disney+ series What If…? The actor was quickly canonized in popular culture, making things even more difficult for Marvel Studios and its owner, Disney. Parents posted pictures of children crying next to Black Panther action figures while performing Wakanda’s signature cross-armed salute. The loss of a newly minted superstar with a cultural phenomenon like Black Panther behind him resonated around the world.
In December of that year, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige announced that T’Challa would not be recast.
“They didn’t put any conditions on that,” maintains freelance film critic Emmanuel Noisette. “They just said, we’re not gonna recast. I said, ‘Does that mean you’re gonna put him in the background, or are you actually about to kill him off?’”
Noisette began leading the crusade to get Marvel to recast the role. The point is not to tarnish Boseman’s legacy, he contends, but to honor it. He kicked off the campaign to #RecastTChalla in April 2021. A petition on Change.org has since accumulated over 60,000 signatures even as Marvel, Disney and director Ryan Coogler remain mum on the subject. (None responded to requests for comment from The Daily Beast.)
“The best thing we can do is continue his work. [Boseman’s] fighting cancer for four years. He didn’t have to go to work to give us more T’Challa. He could’ve spent time with his family, rested up, but this is what he wanted,” he reasons. “The better way to honor his memory and keep his legacy going is to keep the portrayal of T’Challa.”
The Chicago-based critic believes it’s what Boseman himself would have wanted, citing a text he allegedly sent to journalist and former CNN contributor Roland Martin. Martin said that Boseman told him, “I want them to see the role and not see me. That is the job of the actor. It’s not about me, it’s about the role, and people remember the role and what you did with it.”
In December, Derrick Boseman told TMZ that his famous brother would’ve wanted the role to go to someone else, explaining that it’s important for Black boys all over the country to see a Black king lead a tentpole summer blockbuster.
Noisette argues that the MCU has already done Black Panther dirty, with the hero being “dusted” away in Avengers: Infinity War after coming close to dying in the first Black Panther film.
“He was literally created for Black representation,” says Noisette. “Something so rich, something so symbolic, in a character—to me, it’s just a travesty to wait a few years to get him on screen and take him away and litter his legacy with death.”
Some fans say they don’t want the pain of Boseman’s death to be mirrored in the Afrofuturistic fantasy world of Black Panther. Others find the discourse around recasting T’Challa to be tinged with misogyny. Some Twitter users have even pointed to especially sexist and misguided comments that suggest a conspiracy by Marvel and Disney to emasculate Black men or portray them as absent.
“Black men aren’t being erased from the main cast? You sure about that? They didn’t even cast new brothers to balance it out, they just added 2 new sisters and brown people,” read one tweet, referring to the casting of Michaela Coel, Dominique Thorne, and Tenoch Huerta in Wakanda Forever.
Noisette is under no illusion that Wakanda Forever will be tampered with this late in the game, but with the multiverse becoming an ever more prominent mechanism within the MCU, he hopes the studio figures out a way to bring back the beloved main character.
Broadnax, who spoke to Noisette about this in a recent episode of her podcast, says her views on the matter have evolved.
“I’m of the belief now that Marvel knows what they’re doing,” she says. “Whether it’s gonna happen in Black Panther 3 or 4, I am of the belief that a recast will happen. But yeah, I’m not of this ilk of folks that think that this film is doomed to fail because they didn’t get what they want.”
