"Black Panther" producer Nate Moore, responding to rumors on social media, said the role of T'Challa, originally played by the late Chadwick Boseman, will not be recast in "Black Panther 3."
"The truth is, there's no truth to those rumors. Never say never to anything, we haven't really had a lot of creative conversations with Ryan Coogler yet, because he's finishing his film 'Sinners,' which comes out this year," Moore said in an interview with ComicBook. "We'll get into it later this year, but everything you read online is not true, if for no other reason than we just haven't started [working on it]."
Boseman first portrayed T'Challa in 2016's "Captain America: Civil War," and later starred in the 2018 "Black Panther" film. He reprised the role in "Avengers: Infinity War" (2018) and "Avengers: Endgame" (2019).
Boseman, diagnosed with stage III colon cancer in 2016, died at age 43 in August 2020. "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" was released in 2022, dedicated to his memory, and continued the story after T'Challa's death.
There was controversy surrounding calls to recast Boseman, which led to a petition stating that removing the character T'Challa "would be at the expense of the audiences (especially Black boys and men) who saw themselves in him."
In 2021, during an appearance on the Ringer-Verse podcast after Boseman's death, Moore said they could not recast him.
"When Chad passed, it was a real conversation we had with [director Ryan] Coogler about, 'What do we do?' And it was a fast conversation. It wasn't weeks, it was minutes of we had to figure out how to move that franchise on without that character," Moore said. "Because I think we all feel so much of T'Challa in the MCU on the screen ... is tied to Chadwick's performance."
Moore added: "At no point did we consider recasting" the upcoming "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever," even though it was hard to plot the film without Boseman.