Marvel boss Kevin Feige recently told Empire how David Jonsson was cast as the next Black Panther. He explained that “The Long Walk” star met with “Black Panther” director Ryan Coogler in a “secret meeting,” and that the Oscar winner quickly identified Jonsson as his next leading man.
“We hadn’t started a search yet,” Feige explained. “Ryan was working on ‘Sinners,’ and when Ryan works on a project he’s all in. So the presumption very much was we would sit with him after ‘Sinners’ came out, after the Academy campaign. We were waiting ’til after the Academy Awards to sit with Ryan and begin that process.”
He added, “A month and a half or so before that process, he called me and said, ‘I found him’. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He goes, ‘I found him. He’s this guy, David Jonsson.’ He mentioned his movies. I had seen some of them. I watched more. He goes, ‘I’m going to meet him.’ He had a secret meeting with him under cloak of darkness in a hotel somewhere, and called me afterwards and said, ‘He’s the guy, he’s the guy, I felt it. I felt it in my soul. He’s a good man, and he is the next Black Panther.’ And I got chills, and I got a little welled-up and said, ‘Let’s do it’. So we’ve been sitting on this secret for a good five or six months.”
Jonsson will play T’Challa’s son in “Black Panther 3,” which hits theaters Dec. 15, 2028. The announcement was made during Marvel’s Hall H panel on Saturday at San Diego Comic-Con. Original cast members Leticia Wright and Winston Duke are returning for the new chapter, which follows Prince T’Challa II as he comes of age and takes up the Black Panther mantle.
After Chadwick Boseman died of colon cancer at age 43 in 2020, Wright was the first to take over as the Black Panther in 2022’s “Wakanda Forever.”
Marvel launched the first “Black Panther” in 2018 to overwhelming acclaim. It grossed $1.3 billion at the worldwide box office and earned seven Oscar nominations, including best picture.
