SPOILER WARNING!
In the inevitable mid-credits stinger for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Letitia Wright's Shuri, who has assumed the mantle of the Black Panther but has handed the opportunity to serve as Ruler of Wakanda to the tribes to sort out among themselves, pays Lupita N'yongo's Nakia a visit in her adopted home of Haiti, only to find that Nakia and her late brother have had a son whom she has also named T'Challa.
And so the question of how to keep T'Challa's story going without recasting the role has been answered. Personally, I didn't care for this approach, but I guess it beats having a multiversal variant of T'Challa hop into universe 616 through an errant Doctor Strange portal.
Crucially, though, even though there was an obligatory "Black Panther will return" text in the final credits crawl, the generally somber mood of the film and the absence of an end-credits teaser kind of had me wondering...exactly when will that be, and who will be wearing the mantle then?
Yes, I know the film ended with Shuri taking her synthetic heart-shaped herb and donning the Black Panther suit, but her doing so felt less like a passing of the torch and more like designating her as a placeholder until the new T'Challa is old enough to assume the identity, something which, barring an Avengers: Endgame style time-jump, won't happen for a very long time. Shuri didn't hold the Black Panther mantle for very long in the comics either, after all. Maybe after telling this very cathartic story about grief, Marvel really does need to lay the character to rest, at least for a while.
That actually got me wondering; how does Marvel plan to "retire" the second batch of Avengers, i.e. those introduced mostly in Phase 3? The likes of Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Sam Wilson as Captain America, by the next Avengers movie, will have been around for nearly ten years. James Gunn has openly said that the current incarnation of the Guardians of the Galaxy will end with the third movie. Avengers: Endgame was the perfect way to retire at least three of the O.G. Avengers, while the Hawkeye series may have provided a convenient road to retirement for Jeremy Renner's Clint Barton as well as a low-key passing of the torch to Hailee Steinfeld's Kate Bishop. As much as I despised Thor: Love and Thunder, it does make sense that Thor, being a god, is still around, as is the case with the ultra-powerful Hulk. One does wonder, however, how much longer Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo will agree to appear in these roles, especially given Hemsworth's recent discovery that he is genetically predisposed to Alzheimer's disease and Ruffalo's, well, age. Will these characters be allowed to retire, or will they get barbecued by an Infinity-Stone-like McGuffin? It's not particularly pleasant to contemplate but considering how Black Widow and Iron Man met their ends in Avengers: Endgame I can't help but think about it.
Another issue I have with characters being retired, whether through death or otherwise, is that I can't help but wonder: what happens if audiences don't embrace the replacements that Marvel is lining up for them, much in the same way that Star Wars fans have, by and large, rejected the poor copies of Luke Skywalker and his crew that were trotted out in the Disney-era sequels?
In the last few years, it has been made clear that nearly all of the "OG" Avengers have replacements lined up, with Anthony Mackie's Falcon having taken up the Captain America mantle, Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova clearly being set up as the new Black Widow, and Tatiana Maslany's She-Hulk rather blatantly being set up as the replacement for the Hulk. Ironheart, or Riri Williams was introduced in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever to set up her upcoming Disney+ show and it's pretty obvious that she's basically the next Iron Man. It would seem that all of the MCU characters are fair game for this treatment, with the exception, of course, of Sony-held Spider-Man, who will likely live forever. The thing is, how will audiences feel about it? I can't help but wonder.
What I find sad about this development is that, apart from the characters who have made it to the big screen, Marvel has literally thousands more at their disposal, especially with the return of the X-Men and the Fantastic Four to Marvel's stable. They went the right route by introducing characters like Shang-Chi and Moon Knight, neither of whom has any connection to what came before. This was what made most of the characters introduced from Phase I through Phase III endearing: they all felt fresh and new. Shang-Chi and Moon Knight both have that feeling, and if people had responded well to the Eternals, well, they would have benefited from that too.
By trotting out "replacement Avengers," however, Marvel could be setting themselves up for a serious fall in the not-too-distant future.
That's just me speculating, of course; in the end the market will determine what stays and what goes, just like it's done with the comic books for decades.
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