The passing of Chadwick Boseman wasn’t the only hurdle that “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” faced in coming to the screen. The $250 million Marvel Studios project made it into production in 2021 and was going along until August of that year – when an on-set accident in Boston involving a motorcycle sent star Letitia Wright to the hospital.
Wright reportedly had a fractured shoulder and a concussion, among other injuries – injuries severe enough the entire production was shut down between November and January 2022 in order for her to recover. Even then, she had medical personnel monitoring her on set once she returned.
This week Marvel Studios Vice President of Production and Development Nate Moore took part in a producer roundtable for THR and opened up about Wright’s injury during the production.
Appearing alongside producers like Viola Davis and Jerry Bruckheimer, Moore dubbed the injury as more serious than earlier reports may have let on and says:
“Panther was a tough one to get to the screen, but the scariest moment was actually when Tish [Letitia Wright] got injured. We were shooting some second-unit work [and] some stunt work in Boston.
The full crew was still in Atlanta, so I got a call in the middle of the night from the ambulance. That is terrifying because it’s not just about the movie at that point, it’s about a person and a person I’ve known for years. As a producer, you feel responsible for everybody in your crew.
You feel responsible for having her in that position in the first place and picking up the pieces. Figuring out the schedule was almost the easier part than figuring out how to get Tish’s head right and to get her the help that she needed, both physically and mentally.
That was a huge, traumatic thing for her to go through. To make her comfortable to come back and perform at the level that she was performing – you don’t know if you’re going to come back from that, to be quite honest, but she did.”
She did, and she finished the film which saw its theatrical release last November. To date the film has already earned a gross of over $800 million at the worldwide box office and is slated to hit the Disney+ platform next month.
