Marvel Studios unveils ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’

Marvel Studios has unveiled a trailer for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever , the long-awaited sequel to its hit film Black Panther , which it said would open in cinemas in the United States on November 11.

The teaser, screened Saturday at the pop-culture convention Comic-Con International in San Diego, features several cast members from the first film, as well as a tribute to Chadwick Boseman, who played one of the protagonists, King T’Challa. Boseman, whose image appears on a mural in the teaser, died from colon cancer at age 43 in 2020.

The film follows Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), Shuri (Letitia Wright), M’Baku (Winston Duke) General Okoye (Danai Gurira) and the elite women warrior group Dora Milaje (including Ayo, played by Florence Kasumba) as they “fight to protect their nation from intervening world powers in the wake of King T’Challa’s death,” the studio said Saturday in a news release.

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“As the Wakandans strive to embrace their next chapter, the heroes must band together with the help of War Dog Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) and Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) and forge a new path for the kingdom of Wakanda,” the studio added.

The trailer, a visually dazzling glimpse of the future world of Wakanda is set to a cover of the Bob Marley song No Woman, No Cry. Ludwig Goransson, the film’s composer, described it as “an aural first glimpse of Wakanda Forever.”

The “sound world” for the film, he said in the statement, was created during trips to Mexico and Nigeria, where he and others worked with traditional musicians to learn about the “cultural, social and historical contexts of their music.”

Then, they built a catalog of instrumental and vocal recordings together with those artists, and “began to build a musical vocabulary for the characters, storylines and cultures of Talocan and Wakanda,” Goransson said, adding that the idea was to create “an immersive and enveloping sound world for the film.”

The film’s release was announced by the president of Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige, who also noted the upcoming release of several other films and shows, including She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, starring Tatiana Maslany; Secret Invasion, featuring Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Mendelsohn; and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

Speaking at the Comic-Con event Saturday, Nyong’o said it felt “monumental” to return to Wakanda. “The universe of Wakanda is expanding,” she said. “You guys have a lot to look forward to.”

Gurira, who plays Okoye, the general of Wakanda’s elite female bodyguards and the head of armed forces and intelligence, said that when she was growing up in Zimbabwe she always looked up to the way America “made superheros onstage and on the big screen.”

To the crowd, she added: “You’re taking in that culture, and you’re celebrating it. That, to me, is everything.”