I think that if they start the movie before he becomes king it would be easier to show why he feels a lot of pressure stepping into the shoes of the king. We could see him on his way to Wakanda with Taku or W'Kabi, and he could be expressing how he wants to live up to T'Chaka but may not be worthy. It's hard to tear T'Challa down because he's really humble, so I can't see a storyline where he loses it all to show why it's important to him. He knows how important Wakanda is to his family's legacy, and he wouldn't take that lightly. Instead I would like to see the burden of him out thinking himself at times, and that leads to mistakes. For him if he makes a mistake it could really cause a lot of pain to many people, so that tightrope could be really interesting to see if they write it correctly.
In terms of relating to the audience we can feel for him as a lot of us have parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. who set really huge examples that we want to live up to. The challenge is making T'Challa relatable without ruining what the character is all about. He's a guy who plans for everything, doesn't take pride in much besides his people, and he's already a bad ass fighter before he gains the Panther powers. Setting a guy up like that could be hard, but I think that they could make him really sympathetic by showing how he has pressure from all sides. His adopted brother constantly reminds him of their father's greatness, and he's uber pissed because his secret police was exiled and disbanded in T'Challa's first act as king. He's got to walk a fine line between keeping 10 different tribes of Wakanda happy or else they'll start a war. He still hasn't found his father's killer yet, so Uncle S'Yan keeps bothering him about it. He can be sympathetic because a lot of us feel as though we're being pulled each and every way by the world.
I don't think it would be feasible to see him not knowing that he's the heir to the Black Panther. Wakanda is too tight knit with their borders to let their prince get kidnapped without finding him, and it would make Wakanda look bad for them to have that happen. They wouldn't look so technologically advanced if they could lose the golden boy like that. If they want to separate him from Wakanda to "grow" him then they could have him stateside to meet with the U.N. when Klaw attacks or something like that.
All this talk of the movie really makes me hope that they'll eventually do a BP movie. I've gotten most of what I reasonably want from comics besides a Black Panther movie. Don't mess this up for me, Marvel. I'd be a sad panda, and we don't like sad pandas.
