Black Panther

Set roughly a week after Civil War. T'Challa returns to be crowned. Erik "Killmonger" Stevens — son of T'Challa's uncle N'Jobu, who was killed by T'Chaka in Oakland in 1992 and whose child was abandoned there — arrives to claim the throne and use Wakandan weapons to arm oppressed people worldwide.

The moral force of the film is that Killmonger is not wrong about Wakanda's isolationism, only about the solution. T'Challa wins the fight and adopts half his argument: Wakanda reveals itself and opens outreach centres, beginning with Oakland.

Shuri, T'Challa's sister, is Wakanda's chief scientist. Okoye leads the Dora Milaje. Nakia, M'Baku, and Ramonda all matter later. Ulysses Klaue dies; Everett Ross of the CIA becomes an ally.

The mechanics of the throne matter for everything that follows: Wakandan succession can be challenged in ritual combat, and the challenger must first be stripped of the heart-shaped herb's enhancement so the fight is even. Killmonger wins his challenge legitimately, which is why nobody can simply remove him — he is the lawful king, and the film's crisis is constitutional as much as moral.

His claim is real. N'Jobu, T'Challa's uncle, was stationed in Oakland in 1992 and radicalised by what he saw; T'Chaka killed him and left the child behind, and the Wakandan state erased both facts. When T'Challa confronts his father's spirit about it, the film's target stops being Killmonger and becomes the generation that made him.

Killmonger burns the herb garden to prevent any successor, and is beaten only after M'Baku and the Jabari — the fifth tribe, who withdrew to the mountains generations earlier — enter a war they had refused to join. Offered healing, Killmonger chooses death over a cell, quoting ancestors who jumped from slave ships.