Currently available across Digital HD, DVD and Blu-ray, Marvel’s Black Panther reached home video with a slew of extras and bonus features in tow.
Chief among them were the four deleted scenes – namely “Okoye And W’Kabi Discuss the Future of Wakanda,” “U.N. Meet and Greet,” “T’Challa Remembers His Father,”and “T’Chaka’s Difficult Choice” – designed to bring us closer to some of the content that ultimately remained on the cutting room floor.
There are some real stand-outs, too, with Okoye and W’Kabi’s charged exchange being a particular highlight, though at least according to Marvel producer Nate Moore, viewers needn’t hold their breath for an extended version of Black Panther. Why, you ask? Because Ryan Coogler’s initial cut was simply too long.
Yeah, Ryan’s directors cut was long. It was interesting even in the scriptwriting process we knew that the piece of material that we shot had some scenes that wouldn’t make it into the final cut just because of the ambition of the story that Ryan wanted to tell. So the four-hour cut was literally everything in the film that was shot assembled in a way that obviously had the bones of the final film but had some additional things, some of which are in the DVD extras that people can explore.
In its earliest state, Black Panther seemingly neared the four-hour mark, though it wasn’t until the visual effects and soundtrack were added that Coogler’s Afrocentric blockbuster came into focus. And went on to become one of 2018’s highest-grossing movies – second only to Avengers: Infinity War.
Moore continued:
I don’t think ultimately we would do an extended cut because a lot of times what happens with those early cuts is you don’t finish the visual effects, you don’t finish the sound, so there is pristine four-hour cut that ever existed quite frankly. Even the score that had been tempted in by Ludwig, who started very early on – almost earlier than we’d ever started a composer before – it was his music but not his final version of the music, so all of that stuff exists in a very imperfect state.
Looking to the future, Marvel Studios still has Avengers 4 on the docket, with Black Panther 2 earmarked for a release sometime in the 2020s. And in a separate interview, Nate Moore himself hinted at the possibility of another MCU character – like, say, Winston Duke’s M’Baku – succeeding T’Challa as Panther.
