Since the shocking and untimely passing of Chadwick Boseman back in 2020, the future of the Black Panther franchise has been shrouded in understandable uncertainty. While Ryan Coogler has spoken briefly about his ideas for where T’Challa would have gone next, those plans were tragically not meant to be, and 2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever established Shuri as the inheritor of the Black Panther mantle. But that same film introduced T’Challa and Nakia’s young son, T’Challa II (aka Toussaint), already implying that at some point in the future he’ll be taking the role over from his aunt.
That torch passing just might come sooner than anyone thought, however, as it was revealed at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con that David Jonsson (seen in HBO’s Industry, the rom-com Rye Lane, and 2025’s Alien: Romulus) will be playing an adult version of Toussaint in the upcoming Black Panther 3. Naturally, the first question raised by the casting is how exactly T’Challa’s son, who appeared in Wakanda Forever as a six year old, will be aged up in a way conducive to the MCU’s timeline; there’s always the possibility that it could just be a time-jump, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for the franchise to skip forward a whole twenty years. There is, however, a potential solution, one found in the pages of a semi-recent Black Panther comic arc.
