David Jonsson will play T’Challa’s grown son in Black Panther 3, Ryan Coogler said at San Diego Comic-Con, where Marvel also set the film for Dec. 18, 2028. The casting puts Jonsson at the center of the next chapter in the Wakanda story and confirms that the sequel will lean into the family line left open at the end of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
For readers searching his name now, the timing is the news. Jonsson, who recently appeared in The Long Walk and Alien: Romulus, was introduced onstage in Hall H alongside Coogler, Kevin Feige, Letitia Wright and Winston Duke. Denzel Washington is also in the cast, giving the film a separate marquee draw even before a frame of the sequel has been shot.
The role itself has been hiding in plain sight. Jonsson’s character first appeared in a post-credit scene in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever as Toussaint, also known as T’Challa II, introduced by Lupita Nyong’o’s Nakia. That means the new announcement does not unveil a character so much as it confirms who will carry him forward, after the sequel had already used the name and the family tie to signal where the story was headed.
That matters because the franchise has always moved by inheritance as much as action. The first Black Panther grossed $1.3 billion and won three Oscars, while Black Panther: Wakanda Forever grossed $859 million and won an Oscar for Ruth Carter’s Costume Design after Chadwick Boseman died of cancer in August 2020. With T’Challa II now cast as a grown son, Black Panther 3 is not starting from zero; it is extending a line the films have already established.
What remains unknown is how Coogler will frame that next step. The only confirmed shape so far is that T’Challa II is coming of age and moving toward the crown of Wakanda, with the new casting making clear that the sequel’s emotional center will be about succession as much as spectacle. By the time Black Panther 3 opens on Dec. 18, 2028, the question will not be whether the character returns, but how much of Wakanda’s future he is meant to inherit.
