All hail Ryan Coogler.
When watching Ryan Coogler's Black Panther, it can almost be easy to forget that this movie takes place in the MCU. After all, it is so radically different than anything Marvel has done in the past (and all the better for it).
However, while most of us are getting wrapped up in the drama taking place in Wakanda, Marvel fans have been asking one question: where’s the Infinity Stones?
Turns out Coogler has a good reason as to why he didn’t feel it necessary to include them in Black Panther.
“I love the Infinity Stones as much as any comic book fan, it’s just Wakanda already has its thing, which is Vibranium,” he said via CinemaBlend. “For us, that was special enough, so to throw in something like another special thing didn’t feel right. It felt like we should stick with our one MacGuffin for the country and explore that — let that be the important thing because, frankly, we didn’t need to have another piece like that.”
Bless Ryan Coogler for that. Infinity Stones are arguably the biggest MacGuffin that MCU has to offer, despite giving us little to no information as to what they actually do. Any addition of the soul stone would have stuck out like a sore thumb — I mean, can you really imagine Okoye or M’Baku getting up in arms about the infinity gauntlet?
Yeah, yeah, Black Panther and all of its characters are going to be tied into the rest of the MCU when Avengers: Infinity War comes out, but for now, we’re just going to enjoy it as its own thing.
Plus, this still puts the emphasis on where the final Infinity Stone actually is — something we’ll sure will factor into Infinity War.
Black Panther is in theaters now.