SAN DIEGO – Ryan Coogler walked out onto Hall H on Saturday morning and the crowd of 6,500 at San Diego Comic-Con went quiet before it went loud. What followed was the biggest announcement in the three-hour Marvel Studios presentation: Black Panther 3, confirmed, with Coogler returning to direct and a new actor stepping into the vibranium suit.
That actor is David Jonsson, 32, whose work in “Alien: Romulus” established him as one of Hollywood’s most closely watched performers. He will play T’Challa’s son, the boy named Toussaint in Haiti by Nakia in the closing minutes of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” and who carries his father’s Wakandan name. Marvel confirmed a December 15, 2028 release date.
The casting ends years of speculation about how the Black Panther franchise would continue after the death of Chadwick Boseman in 2020. “Wakanda Forever” honored Boseman by not replacing him, shifting the mantle to Letitia Wright’s Shuri. The third film takes a different direction, passing that mantle to the next generation and to a character who has existed only in the margins of the story until now.
Variety first reported that Coogler held a private meeting with Jonsson months before the Comic-Con announcement, an uncommon step that reflected the director’s deliberate approach to the casting. Coogler confirmed the meeting on stage Saturday but declined to detail what it contained. “I just knew,” he said, and left it there.
Jonsson appeared on stage to a standing ovation, flanked by Wright and Winston Duke, both confirmed to return to the franchise. He kept his remarks short. He said he saw the original “Black Panther” in a London theater in 2018 “and understood something I hadn’t before.” He did not specify what that something was.
The original Black Panther earned $1.35 billion worldwide and received a Best Picture Oscar nomination, the first superhero film to achieve that distinction. “Wakanda Forever” followed in 2022 under conditions few films have navigated, grossing $859 million without its central star. The third film arrives under different circumstances, with a new actor inheriting a character that Marvel has, until now, been careful not to define too clearly.
What the franchise requires now is less the architecture of a superhero origin story than the inherited weight of identity. T’Challa’s son is Wakandan by name and unknown by narrative, a character whose entire existence in the Marvel canon rests on a single post-credits sequence in which he says almost nothing. Building a film around that figure demands a particular kind of actor, one capable of making silence and backstory coexist without explanation.
Jonsson brings a specific set of qualities to that challenge. Trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, he appeared in “Industry,” the HBO and BBC series set in the financial world, before a supporting role in “The Long Walk” brought wider attention. “Alien: Romulus,” the Fede Alvarez-directed horror film released in summer 2024, made his name in mainstream terms. The performance drew critical attention for its physical precision and a capacity for stillness that the film deployed against him in ways that required both qualities simultaneously.
Whether Coogler saw something in that restraint that fit the character of T’Challa’s son remains his own answer. He brought Jonsson from London to Los Angeles for a conversation, and the next day he knew. On Saturday, Hall H confirmed the grade.
The reveal came at the close of a panel that opened with Ryan Gosling confirmed as Ghost Rider in a separate Marvel project also targeting 2028. As ABC News reported, Gosling’s announcement generated its own audience response before Coogler’s appearance shifted the temperature. By the time Jonsson walked out, the crowd had already applauded twice. The third ovation lasted the longest.
Marvel provided no further details about Black Panther 3’s story, whether Lupita Nyong’o will reprise Nakia, or what version of Wakanda the film will inhabit. The character’s trajectory remains open. Toussaint in “Wakanda Forever” was five years old in the scene where Nakia revealed him. In December 2028, he will be old enough to wear the suit. Everything between those two moments is the film’s to fill in, and Marvel has chosen not to start filling in publicly.
Kevin Feige called Black Panther 3 a “cornerstone” of Marvel’s next phase during earlier remarks in the presentation and offered no elaboration. Coogler, closing his time on stage, said only that the script was still being written. December 2028 gives him time to finish it. The audience that gave David Jonsson a standing ovation in Hall H on Saturday will have to wait a little over two years to find out what they were applauding.
