Introducing the Black Panther

The way Avengers Campus continues to evolve through its inclusion of characters from Marvel shows and films as they are released keeps the environment exciting—especially considering that its recently announced third E-ticket attraction inspired by the Multiverse Saga is still a ways off. While we wait for the area’s offerings to expand, the debut of the new Black Panther is a solid way to bring out the energy of fans excited to interact with the world of Wakanda.

Creative director Michael Serna—the park’s resident Marvel fanboy who got to get in on the ground floor of developing Avengers Campus—discussed working directly with Marvel Studios on all the phases. “I was just very fortunate that I was working at Imagineering at the time and it became very important to everybody else,” he said. “It was really a perfect moment for me to be able to jump in and start to tell these stories and work with other filmmakers and storytellers.”

And with Wakanda Forever, they knew it would be the area’s biggest opportunity to really bring in new experiences to celebrate the franchise. “We’ve been really thinking about it for a couple of years. As soon as the movie was announced, we thought, well, how are we going to integrate this knowing that the [Avengers] campus was already open and this is going to be our first movie that we knew would be huge?” he said. “So we really wanted to think about how our experiences that we currently had in the campus were going to either work with [it], or [would] we have to change them? In the past six months we got more information on the film. We knew, obviously, who the Black Panther was going to be—those sort of things became clear to us that allowed us to craft how we approach it.”