Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Ryan Coogler opens on a death and a funeral and only then runs the Marvel Studios logo, which is silent and built entirely from footage of Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa. The studio card arrives without its fanfare, so the grief lands before the brand does. The screenplay written before Boseman died was a different film. Code-named Summer Break, it had T’Challa taking Toussaint, his son with Nakia, into the bush for the boy’s eighth birthday ritual to live off the land, with the father’s forced five year absence during the Blip as the engine of the story. Kevin Feige announced the part would not be recast, and Coogler wrote a film about mourning instead. Namor’s people are not the Atlantis of the comics but Talokan, drawn from Maya culture, and Josué Maychi, who also appears as a shaman, coached the cast in Yucatec Maya. Letitia Wright was hurt during a stunt in Boston, the shoot worked around Shuri for months, and production stopped in Thanksgiving week of 2021 before restarting early in 2022. A good fit if you want the opening to be a funeral rather than a fight, and most of the 162 minutes given to negotiation, mourning and statecraft. Not a fit if you want to follow Namor without reading subtitles; his case is argued largely in Maya.