Wakanda Forever” Trailer Is Really Moving

Surely you’ve seen the trailer for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever by now. The teaser for the Marvel sequel has probably been all over your timeline (if it hasn’t, you probably don’t follow enough people of color), accumulating 172 million views on its first day up. It opens with the pained faces of Wakanda’s women staring out into the ocean, reflecting a loss we need no explanation for, builds momentum as the resounding voice of Angela Bassett’s Queen Ramonda projects the resilience we’re all trying to conjure through these troubled times, and soars to the finish line with flashes of action assuring us the forces of good will prevail in a fictional universe that must reckon with the death of its protagonist.

This wasn’t a trailer drawing us in with hints of plot points and dramatic tension. It felt more like an urgent message, as direct and clear as the words of the chorus in the background: Everything’s gonna be alright. Across social media, dozens of people said that the trailer moved them to tears.

“So much turmoil. So much loss. And yet they are clearly STILL focused on blowing us all away,” comedian W. Kamau Bell tweeted.

“I am shaking,” Abbott Elementary creator and star Quinta Brunson tweeted. “And in awe.”

“I’ve cried at this trailer for a couple days now,” Hannah Beachler, the film’s production designer, said in a thread. “Grief was actively happening while we made this film.”

In an interview with Reuters about the trailer’s release on Saturday at San Diego Comic-Con, Lupita Nyong’o, who plays Nakia, a secret agent for Wakanda’s intelligence service, in Black Panther, said “sharing this trailer was cathartic,” and Letitia Wright, who plays Shuri, princess of Wakanda, said the sadness visible onscreen “was real because we feel so deeply and we are grieving so deeply.”

It has been almost exactly two years since Chadwick Boseman, who played T’Challa, the superhero king of the wealthy fictional nation of Wakanda in 2018’s Black Panther, died from cancer at 43. Amid the chaos and mass death of summer 2020, many of us probably haven’t fully processed the loss. People wrote lovely obituaries and held Black Panther watch parties to celebrate Boseman. But I struggled to give the moment the reflection he deserved. It was a tragedy piled on a growing heap of tragedies, a shocking death of a famous Black man at a time when Black people were dying from COVID at disproportionately high rates, and people were marching in the streets to protest police and vigilante killings of Black people. At the time, Boseman’s death struck me as a chilling mark of the racial disparities that defined our country: Not even our most prominent Black superhero could live long enough to partake in the sequel.

No matter how many profiles I read and how much interview footage I watch, my primary relationship to Boseman will always be through the characters he depicted onscreen, his lasting impact on me channeled through that groundbreaking work.