[***If you still haven’t seen Avengers: Infinity War, this post is basically just one big spoiler. You’ve been warned***]
For the rest of us who have seen Infinity War, “the Snap” was one of the more devastating moments ever experienced in the MCU. With a snap of his Infinity Gauntlet-ed fingers, Thanos took out half the world’s population, including some of our favorite heroes. If you’re lower lip wasn’t trembling when Peter Parker whimpered “I don’t wanna go” a la the Tenth Doctor, I’m sorry your soul went missing, and I hope you find it.
One of the more surprising casualties, especially since he just had a hugely successful film, was T’Challa. Apparently, Nate Moore, a producer on Black Panther and an executive at Marvel Studios, knew that T’Challa would be amongst those that die at the end of Infinity War long before the film was ever in production. In fact, he knew about this since 2015, when Black Panther director, Ryan Coogler, was still working on Creed.
Moore tried to convince the Russo Brothers not to kill off T’Challa. According to The Huffington Post, he said of the death:
“I knew pretty well what they were talking about and personally urged them to reconsider. But the storytelling made sense, so I love that we got to see a little bit more of Wakanda in that film, and I hope to see how they’re going to resolve that.”
And while he couldn’t give away too much, of course, he said that ultimately the Russo’s storytelling reasoning was sound for what they have planned. He continued:
“Touching on all the different ideas you can have, you talk about the pros and cons of each, and they had some really compelling arguments as to why what happened happened. I think ultimately it made for a really interesting, almost more complicated ending to that film because of how well Black Panther was embraced by audiences. Again, personally painful, but I understand the reasoning.”
When director Anthony Russo was asked if he’d ever reconsidered T’Challa’s fate in Infinity War, considering how massive Black Panther ended up being, he said no, asserting that story is story. “We were very cued into the storyline of Panther from his origins in Captain America: Civil War,” he said to HuffPo. “The role that Panther and Wakanda played in this movie was sort of a bedrock of the movie, a bedrock of the [Marvel cinematic universe]. I think Black Panther could’ve done half the business that it did and it still would’ve been a valid creative choice.”
Well, we don’t care as much about why he’s gone as we do about how he’s coming back. I mean, there’s already a Black Panther sequel in the works, and this is the world of comic books, after all. No one stays dead.
How do you think “the Snap” will be resolved?
(image: Marvel)
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