BLACK PANTHER Director Ryan Coogler Reveals That Elijah Bradley/Patriot Was Almost A Part Of The Movie
Marvel's Black Panther is pretty jam-packed with supporting characters as is, but director Ryan Coogler has now revealed that he considered adding Young Avengers member Elijah Bradley to the mix early on.
Black Panther director Ryan Coogler has revealed that he and writer Joe Robert Cole considered adding Elijah Bradley, a.k.a. Patriot, to an early draft of the script.
During an interview with CinemaBlend, Coogler explains that they ultimately dropped the idea of utilizing the Young Avengers character in order to keep the story focused on Wakanda, but that the rest of the supporting players were always included.
Crazy enough, for comic book fans, we toyed with the character Patriot for a little bit. Early on we were interested to get our hands on him, Joe [Robert Cole] and I, but that ended up going away so we could focus on Wakanda a little more.
The ones that you see were kind of always there. M'Baku, Killmonger, T'Challa, Nakia, Okoye, Shuri, Ramonda, Klaue, Everett Ross... they were always in every draft. So we had to make sure that they all had arcs, and it had something to do with that.
In the comics, Patriot has no association with T'Challa whatsoever, so it would have been very interesting to see how Coogler would have gone about introducing him in the film.
Bradley could open the door for Marvel to debut the rest of the Young Avengers at some point down the line, so there's always a chance he could show up in the Black Panther sequel, or one of the other movies on the current slate.
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Mark Cassidy is a writer, photographer, amateur filmmaker, and Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic from Dublin, Ireland.