It's been a rough road for Black Panther 2, but after COVID-19 delays, film-industry chaos, and the unexpected death of its lead actor in August, it's scheduled to finally start production in July.
BP2 will again star Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, and Angela Bassett, with Ryan Coogler returning as director and writer. Tenoch Huerta (Narcos: Mexico) is reportedly in talks to join the cast as an unspecified antagonist. Martin Freeman has not yet been confirmed, at time of writing, as reprising his role as Everett Ross.
This indicates that Marvel Studios has figured out what it'll do in the wake of Chadwick Boseman's passing, which has been a subject of intense discussion in the last few weeks. Some fans have speculated that BP2 will take a cue from the comics and promote T'Challa's sister Shuri (Wright) to the role of the Black Panther, but anything is possible.
Another option would be to introduce Kevin Cole, who was created by Christopher Priest and Dan Fraga in 2002, in the last few issues of the third volume of the Black Panther comic. Cole is a second-generation cop in the NYPD, nicknamed "Kasper" by his colleagues for being the light-skinned, mixed-race son of a famous black police detective. When Cole gets suspended without pay, he ends up using a combination of stolen Wakandan technology and his own skills to masquerade as the Black Panther, in order to pursue an investigation into his supervisor's criminal ties.
(This isn't as weird as it sounds. Due to the Marvel Universe being extremely focused on New York City, T'Challa has spent a lot of time there in the comics, including a couple of stints where he posed as an ordinary schoolteacher. It's not entirely unprecedented that a simple street gang might end up having to deal with the Black Panther, rather than Daredevil or Luke Cage.)
Priest, who also originally created several supporting characters for T'Challa who would later move into the MCU, like Nakia (Nyong'o) and Okoye (Guerra), intended the Kasper Cole storyline as a sort of superhero riff on Denzel Washington's 2001 corrupt-cop film Training Day. While Cole has fallen into obscurity in the last few years, his story is virtually custom-made for the MCU.
Marvel VP Victoria Alonso confirmed recently that whatever BP2 plans to do without Boseman, it will not involve any kind of digital duplicate, such as the process that allowed Peter Cushing to make a cameo in Rogue One 22 years after his death. The general tone out of Marvel Studios seems to suggest that BP2 will serve double duty as a memorial project for Boseman, much in the same way as Furious 7 did for the late Paul Walker.
Other Marvel films that start production in 2021, assuming there isn't another industry-demolishing coronavirus spike, knock on wood, include Taika Waititi's Thor: Love and Thunder in January and the She-Hulk and Moon Knight TV series on Disney+. James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, which is expected to be Gunn's last hurrah with the characters, is planned to begin shooting near the end of the year, alongside Peyton Reed's Ant-Man 3, which adds Jonathan Majors as an unspecified villain.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is currently scheduled to start its "Phase 4" in 2021, with Black Widow on May 7th, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings on July 9th, and Eternals on November 11th.
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Source: Hollywood Reporter