Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Trailer Breakdown: Aneka, Namor, and Ironheart

Vibranium. 

Atlantis and Wakanda have basically spent half of their time as Marvel Universe locations at war with each other. T’Challa met Namor before he became Black Panther, and had him marked as a potential threat, and following decades of friction between the two nations, Namor, given a fifth of the power of the Phoenix during Avengers vs. X-Men, used it to devastate Wakanda.

The two were forced to work together shortly thereafter because of the Incursions (the multiversal destruction that led to Secret Wars), but while those went on, Shuri (Queen of Wakanda and Black Panther as well) led a retaliatory invasion of Atlantis. Namor responded by siccing Thanos on Wakanda, T’Challa retaliated with a knife in Namor’s ribs and a kick onto a collapsing Earth 1610, and so on and so on. 

Bottom line: there are lots of reasons for Atlantis and Wakanda to be at war here. But don’t count out Everett K. Ross (Martin Freeman) as one of them. He’s conspicuous in his one scene in the trailer. Is the US government starting a proxy war between two literal superpowers?

I don’t know if any other movie’s trailer could have pulled off the Ironheart moments quite as well as Wakanda Forever did. Moments after discussing her show (briefly) as part of Phase 5, we got to meet Dominique Thorne’s Riri Williams in this trailer. Riri, created during Brian Michael Bendis’ run on Iron Man, is a genius teenage inventor, attending MIT as a 15 year old and building her own Iron Man suit with scraps she stole from school. 

Thorne is in two shots in the trailer: in one, she’s greeting Shuri in Shuri’s lab the same way that Boseman’s T’Challa did in the first Black Panther movie. In the second, she’s banging her logo out of a sheet of metal the same way that Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark did in the first Iron Man movie. I think the trailer’s trying to tell us she’s a big deal.