How Spider-Man Helped Black Panther’s Role in CIVIL WAR Get Bigger
Black Panther had a much bigger role in Captain America: Civil War than I was expecting. He plays an integral role in how the story plays out. Turns out, it wasn’t alway like that. He was originally only supposed to have small part in the film, and T’Challa wasn’t originally going to wear his costume. They were going to save that for the solo film. All that obviously changed, and we can think Spider-Man for it.
Civil War writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely started working on the script for the film before Marvel struck their deal with Sony, but Spider-Man was going to be part of their story from the beginning. When it looked like Marvel wasn’t going to get to work with Spider-Man they ended up beefing up the role of Black Panther. During an interview with CinemaBlaned, Markus explained:
“Originally, T’Challa and T’Chaka were just the representatives of Wakanda, sort of the voice of other countries in the world going, ‘You people are out of control,’ and then to be aggrieved by possible Bucky actions. Frankly, just not have him be Black Panther yet. He’s getting his own movie, you know. He’s the prince of a country! That’s pretty good for a movie. Maybe we get to play with Spider-Man and all that. When things maybe looked like we weren’t going to get Spider-Man, it was like, ‘Let’s put the costume on that guy!’"
After the deal with Sony went through, Spider-Man was added back in and since the story arc of Black Panther had evolved they didn’t want to scale it down again. Markus said that Black Panther "became so integral to the story as it evolved that once Spider-Man came back, we didn’t take him out. So, it was a problem that created a really nice situation.”
It makes me wonder if Spider-Man had just a big of a role as Black Panther did in the story until they changed it up, because that would have been interesting to see. In the end, both characters were handled perfectly, and it’s going to be a blast seeing them in their own solo films.