BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER

DISNEY/MARVEL

In the film’s opening sequence, T’Challa/ Black Panther dies of an illness, and the story becomes that of his grieving sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright). “It was a very emotional journey for us,” says Michael P. Shawver, who edited the movie with Kelley Dixon and Jennifer Lame. “If we got emotional, then we knew that it was working.” Dixon admits that the film also had to delicately address star Chadwick Boseman’s death. “The movie let us have a moment in sadness and grief, along with the fictional world.”

That’s evident from the start. “Marvel has a pretty uniform thing where you have an opening [sequence], and then the Marvel logo comes in and the movie starts,” says Shawver. “Since we have this Marvel logo with Chadwick, we faded from Shuri crying to pictures of T’Challa and Chadwick to keep you in that emotional place, blurring the lines that we were walking between real life and filmmaking.” They also relied on sound in the opening. Shawver notes that the initial intent was to include audio clips of world leaders talking about the loss of T’Challa, but found this “a little too busy.” Instead, they took a cue from the scene at the riverbank when Ramonda (Angela Bassett) says “she heard T’Challa in the breeze and felt him in the wind. If you listen to it, there’s wind and there’s a breeze, and it sort of sets his presence up. Then we had that wind come in [again at the end] when Shuri lets go. We actually see the clips of T’Challa at the very end when she’s at the fire and the fire goes away, the ocean goes away — and it’s that wind.”

Dixon

Shawver