When Black Panther finally arrived back in February 2018, it had truly been a long time coming. After all, plans were in place to bring Marvel’s Wakandan monarch to cinemas for decades, with Wesley Snipes even trying to get a film based on the iconic hero made back in the 90s. The wait was certainly worth it, though, as the movie became an instant cultural phenomenon, earning over $1.3 billion at the box office and also finding itself as the first comic book film to get a Best Picture nod at the Academy Awards. Not bad, right?
Furthermore, the pic’s wild success truly cemented T’Challa as one of the MCU’s marquee superheroes, though it’s not exactly like Marvel’s capitalized on that. Neither Infinity War or Endgame gave him a whole lot to do and we still haven’t heard too much about Black Panther 2. Not to mention there’ve also already been numerous reports about the studio lining up Shuri to be the next Black Panther.
And now we can add another one to the pile. We’ll caution that this comes from 4chan and as such, should be taken with a grain of salt, but according to this latest rumor, star Chadwick Boseman is on his way out of the MCU and won’t be around much longer. Apparently, Marvel wants “Namor to replace Black Panther as their premiere black hero, with Atlantis being made up of sub-saharans who integrated with the original Atlanteans (lending more weight to Kilmonger’s famous epitaph).”
But that’s not all, as this report also goes on to state that Boseman might be in a similar situation to Terrence Howard. Which is to say that he’s requesting a big pay raise and Marvel isn’t willing to budge. For those who don’t know, Howard did something similar and found himself replaced in the role of War Machine with Don Cheadle.
Does that mean someone else will be playing T’Challa in Black Panther 2? Unlikely, as we imagine Boseman is already under contract for it, and the same might go for the threequel as well. But beyond that, we don’t imagine we’ll be seeing much more of him in the MCU. Again, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard that Marvel is almost done with the character and now that it’s being reported that the actor might be unhappy with his current agreement and demanding more pay, too, it only adds more fuel to the fire and has us thinking Shuri will be taking over the mantle sooner rather than later.
