Black Panther: Wakanda Forever just missed out on beating Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’s opening weekend domestic gross by $6 million. However, the MCU’s Phase 4 closer has only shown a 63% second week drop, which has seen it start to gain ground on both of this year’s previous Marvel releases. The domestic total has climbed to around $290 million after adding around $67 million to its first week totals.

As it currently stands, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s 10-day running total has crept up to just $2.5 million short of Benedict Cumberbatch’s second solo outing as Doctor Strange. At its current rate, the Black Panther sequel could easily become Marvel’s highest grossing movie of the year, and could settle into second place in the list of the year’s biggest releases, with only Avatar: The Way of Water still to come that’s could possibly challenge it.

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One thing that is really working in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s favor is its reviews, which have been pretty solid from critics and outstanding from audiences. In comparison, Wakanda Forever has pulled in a 95% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, which is ten percent more than Multiverse of Madness and almost twenty percent higher than Thor: Love and Thunder. When it comes to saving the best of Phase 4 for last, Marvel Studios have pretty much come up trumps.

Could Someone Else Play T’Challa In Future?

While a big part of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is dealing with the death of T’Challa, one person who believes that the character will return someday with another actor in the role is Black Panther star Winston Duke.

While the recasting of T’Challa has been continuously ruled out by the powers that be at Marvel Studios, Duke recently commented on the idea that sometime in the future, well beyond the current MCU, Black Panther could end up being remade with a new actor in the role of T’Challa. He recently said:

However, in the MCU changes have been made to the story of T’Challa to incorporate the real life passing of Chadwick Boseman, and following the events of Wakanda Forever, it is clear that T’Challa’s MCU journey is at an end, but that does not mean that Black Panther comic storylines won’t be incorporated into future movies in some ways. After all, Kevin Feige has frequently said that the MCU is an adaptation of the comics rather than being a direct translation, meaning that character changes are to be expected.

“There’s no way they’ll never remake Black Panther in the future. There’s no way that the saga and interpretation of T’Challa, King of Wakanda, will end. He is canon. So trust that it’ll come. But allow [Black Panther: Wakanda Forever] to be a human experience.”

For now, the mourning of both Boseman and his on screen character are very real in the minds of many MCU fans, and that has certainly helped the emotional connection of the movie with audiences. Whether it will help to push the movie beyond the $1 billion worldwide mark is something that we will find out in the coming weeks.