Black Panther Was Originally Designed As An Origin Story

It wasn’t until the release of Captain America: Civil War that Ryan Coogler and Marvel über-producer Nate Moore got a hold on Black Panther.

That’s according to Moore himself, who spoke on a spoiler-filled episode of the Empire Podcast (h/t Screen Rant) about T’Challa and his long, meandering journey to the screen.

Turns out Marvel has been quietly working on their Black Panther movie since 2010, when Joe Robert Cole was brought on to develop a screenplay. Slowly but surely the standalone pic fell into place, though it wasn’t until Chadwick Boseman’s MCU debut in the aforementioned Civil War that Moore and Cole had a sudden realization: Black Panther could be so much more than your standard superhero origin story.

[I’ve been working on Black Panther] since I got [to Marvel]. So, 2010, we started developing a standalone movie, and with a very talented writer [Cole]. And we soon found ourselves falling into the pitfalls of an origin story movie and that sort of familiar structure that just wasn’t as exciting as we wanted it to be. So, we put it on the shelf for awhile, and it wasn’t until we were developing Captain America: Civil War that we saw an opportunity to introduce the character in a different way – that both served that movie really well, would be a great launching pad for the character, and allow us to do a film that could skip all the origin story pitfalls and just tell a cool story.

Shortly thereafter, Marvel tasked Ryan Coogler with fleshing out a full-length feature. And the rest is history. Unrestricted by the shackles of an origin story and other genre clichés, Coogler was able to create a powerful and revolutionary expansion of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that finally put Wakanda’s name up in lights, where it’ll likely remain for a very, very long time.

Black Panther is already screening in theaters across the globe and at least so far, it’s racked up around $462 million in box office receipts.