Shuri
Shuri of Wakanda
Movie · Phase 4
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
2022 · 161 min
T'Challa dies of an undisclosed illness his sister could not cure in time, and Wakanda spends a year being circled by nations that want its vibranium. Then a vibranium detector built by an MIT…
The Multiverse SagaDisney+84%Released
The story
T'Challa dies of an undisclosed illness his sister could not cure in time, and Wakanda spends a year being circled by nations that want its vibranium. Then a vibranium detector built by an MIT sophomore reveals a second source under the Atlantic, and something older than Wakanda comes up to object.
Namor rules Talokan, a Maya civilisation that fled Spanish colonisation into the sea, and his demand is straightforward: hand over the girl who built the machine or lose your queen. It is a two-hour-forty-minute film about grief that is also a geopolitical thriller, and Coogler's refusal to recast T'Challa makes the whole thing ache.
Key facts
- Release date
- 11 Nov 2022
- Status
- Released
- Phase
- Phase 4
- Saga
- The Multiverse Saga
- Runtime
- 161 min
- Certificate
- PG-13
- Director
- Ryan Coogler
- Writers
- Ryan Coogler, Joe Robert Cole
- Streaming
- Disney+
- Timeline placement
- 2025 — one year after T'Challa's death, roughly concurrent with Thor: Love and Thunder
Cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Letitia Wright | Shuri / Black Panther |
| Angela Bassett | Ramonda |
| Tenoch Huerta Mejia | Namor |
| Danai Gurira | Okoye |
| Lupita Nyong'o | Nakia |
| Dominique Thorne | Riri Williams |
| Winston Duke | M'Baku |
Characters
Easter eggs
- The Marvel Studios logo plays in total silence and is built entirely from Chadwick Boseman footage.
- The post-credits scene reveals Nakia and T'Challa's son, Toussaint, named for Toussaint Louverture and bearing his father's Wakandan name.
- Namor's name origin — 'the child without love', read backwards as Roman — is taken directly from his 1939 comic debut.
- Riri Williams' garage-built prototype armour and her MIT dorm set up Ironheart, released three years later.
- Okoye and Aneka's Midnight Angel armour comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates' Black Panther run.
- Namora and Attuma appear as Talokanil commanders, both long-running Sub-Mariner supporting characters.
- Valentina Allegra de Fontaine reveals she is Everett Ross' ex-wife, quietly consolidating her CIA power base across Phase 4.
- Shuri's Ancestral Plane vision brings back Michael B. Jordan's Killmonger rather than her brother, which tells you exactly where her head is.
Trivia
- Ryan Coogler rewrote the film after Chadwick Boseman's death in August 2020 and refused to recast T'Challa, arguing the loss had to be in the story.
- Talokan's dialogue is performed in Yucatec Maya, with the cast working with Maya language coaches throughout.
- Rihanna wrote and recorded 'Lift Me Up', her first solo release in six years; it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
- Letitia Wright suffered a serious on-set injury during a stunt in Boston, halting production for several months.
- Ruth E. Carter won a second Costume Design Oscar, becoming the first Black woman to win two Academy Awards in any category.
- The underwater sequences used a purpose-built tank plus dry-for-wet wire work, with the cast training in freediving.
- At 161 minutes it is the longest MCU film other than Endgame.
Box office
- Budget
- $250 million
- Worldwide
- $859.2 million
- Domestic
- $453.8 million
Reviews
Critics
84%
Grief-stricken yet cathartic, Wakanda Forever honours its late star while delivering a satisfying, emotionally resonant sequel.
The MarvelGossips verdict
An overloaded film carrying a genuine loss with real grace, and Angela Bassett's UN speech is the best single scene in Phase 4. It is also thirty minutes too long, and Namor is compelling enough that the plot's insistence on a war feels engineered. Boseman's absence is the film's subject and its structural problem at once.
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Frequently asked
Why wasn't T'Challa recast?
Ryan Coogler and Kevin Feige both decided the character should not be recast after Chadwick Boseman's death, choosing instead to write his loss into the story. Coogler has said recasting was never seriously considered.
Who is the new Black Panther?
Shuri, played by Letitia Wright, who synthesises the heart-shaped herb and takes the mantle after her mother's death. She is confirmed to appear in Avengers: Doomsday.
Is Namor a villain?
He is an antagonist with a defensible position — a leader protecting a people who already survived one genocide. The film ends with a truce rather than a defeat, and he explicitly plans to call on Wakanda again.
What is Talokan?
An underwater Maya civilisation that fled Spanish colonisation and smallpox in the sixteenth century using a mutated plant. It replaces the comics' Atlantis, a change Coogler made to mirror Wakanda's own history.