As the mid-credits scene in “Wakanda Forever” revealed, T’Challa had actually had a son with Lupita Nyong’o’s Nakia. Unfortunately, the Blip took T’Challa away for five years, leaving him unwittingly estranged from his son. That relationship, following his return and in the aftermath of “Endgame,” was going to be at the center of the original film. As Coogler explained:
“T’Challa was a dad who’d had this forced five-year absence from his son’s life. The first scene was an animated sequence. You hear Nakia talking to [their son] Toussaint. She says, ‘Tell me what you know about your father.’ You realize that he doesn’t know his dad was the Black Panther. He’s never met him, and Nakia is remarried to a Haitian dude. Then, we cut to reality and it’s the night that everybody comes back from the Blip. You see T’Challa meet the kid for the first time.”
The idea of opening with an animated sequence is particularly interesting, as it would have mirrored how the first “Black Panther” opened by showing us an animated history of Wakanda. The fact that Nakia had also remarried certainly would have provided fertile ground for complex character beats and rich storytelling; she and T’Challa were together by the end of the first movie, but after Thanos dusted half the universe no one had any reason to expect that their loved ones would one day return to them.