‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ Gets Pushed Back

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever gets a new release date.

While DC dominated the weekend with information about its upcoming slate, Marvel had their own updates. On Monday, October 18th, Marvel revealed that they were pushing back a number of their upcoming movies, starting with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which will release on May 6, 2022, instead of late March. (There was some talk that this was done to avoid smoke with The Batman, which is coming out in March.)

And because Doctor Strange 2 got pushed back, that means the whole slate has got bumped. The biggest causality is Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, who will not be coming out in July 2022. Now the next installment in the BP series will be coming out in November 11, 2022, right in time for the start of Oscar season. 

Other updates: the next Thor movie, Love and Thunder, is being moved from May 6, 2022 to July 8. And The Marvels — a new MCU movie — is launching in 2023. (The original date was in November.) The third installment in the Ant-Man movie, the Wasp: Quantumania, will be dropping summer 2023. 

It’s still unclear how director Ryan Coogler will handle the passing of Chadwick Boseman, who plays T’Challa, better known as Black Panther. We know there will be no CGI and certainly no recasting, despite the very vocal wishes of thousands of petition signees.  And it seems like Shuri (Letitia Wright) will take the Black Panther title from her brother. 

Back in April, Lupita Nyong’o, who plays Nakia, spoke a bit about how Coogler is navigating the movie. She said:

“We have a leader in Ryan [Coogler], who feels very much like we do, who feels the loss in a very, very real way as well,” Nyong’o said, noting the way Coogler reworked Black Panther 2 was “so respectful of the loss we’ve all experienced as a cast and as a world.”