Fans of Black Panther are being very vocal about their displeasure with actress Letitia Wright after her supposed anti-vax views were made public.
Wright plays Shuri, the sister of the original Black Panther T’Challa. There’s been talk of recasting another actress in the role for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, but now fans are saying the series should get rid of her completely and just cast a new Black Panther.
“Gotta say, my assertion that the best way to honor Chadwick Boseman would have been to recast T’Challa and let the character he built live on is looking better every day,” said Twitter user Jonathan Lack.
Messages like this are peppered all over the Internet.
Twitter user Jlhill56 had an interesting point about recasting characters in general.
“So kill T’Challa off because the actor died? Why didn’t fans say this about the Joker when Heath Ledger died?”
The decision to honor Bosewick by not recasting the character seems to be more and more of a mistake, fans say, especially with the introduction of the multiverse in the MCU.
One fan said that Marvel is worried it’ll lose money on the film and that’s why it didn’t recast the character.
The recasting of the character almost feels inevitable, one fan said.
All of this is complicated by Wright suffering an injury on the movie’s set and then traveling back to London from the United States to recover. The Hollywood Reporter recently ran a story saying that her alleged unvaccinated status could affect the filming of the movie.
The CDC now requires non-citizens and non-immigrants flying into the country to be fully vaccinated. Filming of the movie actually stopped because of the injury, and now it’s unknown when or if Wright will be able to return.
Wright hasn’t fully come out and said she’s not vaccinated, but she gained a lot of negative attention for sharing an anti-vax video saying the vaccine was unsafe, that the virus was spread by China and other unproven views not backed up by science.
We’ll see if all this negative attention causes Disney to abandon its plan to make Shuri the star of the movie and actually recast Black Panther after all.