David Jonsson to play T'Challa's son in Black Panther 3

There is one scene that has been sitting in this universe like an open bracket: after the credits of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”, Nakia, played by Lupita Nyong’o, introduces a boy and says he is T’Challa’s son. Audiences watched that moment in a silence that was personal rather than dramatic, because Chadwick Boseman had died in the meantime and Marvel had refused to recast his role. The scene was a promise and a postponement at once. As of this weekend, it has a face.

At the Marvel Studios panel in San Diego, Kevin Feige and Ryan Coogler announced that British actor David Jonsson will play the adult Toussaint, or T’Challa II, in the third instalment. Coogler stays on as writer and director, the film is being shot on 70 millimetre stock, and the release is set for December 15, 2028. Marvel returned to Hall H after two years away and arrived not with a trailer but with a name, which is in itself a statement about where the weight of this franchise now sits.

How do you inherit a role nobody wanted to recast?

The decision not to recast T’Challa was ethical before it was commercial, and the studio paid for it: “Wakanda Forever” was a film about the hole in its own middle rather than about a hero. Now that hole is being filled sideways, through a generational shift. Toussaint is not a replacement for his father, he is a consequence of his father’s absence, and that is a far more interesting dramatic position than a straightforward handover of the shield.

Coogler knows this terrain. His directing sensibility has always been more familial than heroic, more concerned with inheritance and guilt than with saving the world, and the first two films are strongest exactly where they least resemble a comic book. If the third takes seriously the idea that a crown is carried rather than won, it has a chance to be something Marvel has not made in a long while: a film that does not have to justify itself against a release calendar.

The choice of Jonsson is smarter than it first appears. He is not a star the studio is buying as insurance, but an actor built on television and in chamber roles, in a register where the work is done with the face rather than the line. For a character who inherits a name and not a position, that is a more logical fit than someone who would play the part as a coronation.

Shooting on 70 millimetres is not a marketing flourish

The 70 millimetre detail is easy to read as format fetishism, but it has a practical point here. A close-up on stock that wide holds a level of detail that digital tends to flatten, and this whole series rests on production design that is more carefully thought through than most studio blockbusters. Wakanda is one of the few invented countries in contemporary cinema that has something resembling urban planning rather than just concept art.

The risk is the one that always comes with the format: a film that looks monumental easily starts behaving monumentally. The previous instalment occasionally lost its rhythm under the weight of its own subject, and that is the one genuine reservation worth remembering until 2028. Two and a half years is enough time to get a script into shape, and also enough time to turn a good idea into an obligation.

For now we have a name, a date, a format and the director who invented this world in the first place. That is more than Marvel brought to San Diego in any of the last few years.

Are you more curious about how Coogler tells a story of inheritance, or would you rather watch a film that never mentions the father at all?