WANDAVISION
AFTER ENDGAME, A NEW START. WITH WANDAVISION MARVEL IS BRINGING SOME OF ITS BIGGEST GUNS TO THE SMALL SCREEN, AND HERALDING A NEW ERA FOR SUPERHEROES
Your exclusive first look at the show that puts the ‘MCU’ into ‘TV’. Wait a second... TMCUV? That doesn’t work.
The ‘M’ in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s official acronym is a contender, for obvious reasons. And where would Thanos have been without the ‘U’ to snap away? But actually it might just be the ‘C’. “Cinematic” is a word that conjures thoughts of scope, of scale, of moving images and imagination that could only work on a big screen, and which were far beyond the reach of the small.
For years, it seemed that that’s how Kevin Feige, the man who is president of Marvel Studios and chief architect of the MCU, felt. Feige’s purview was simple: he was the custodian of the cinematic. The TV side of operations was delegated to others.
The results of the latter have been the very definition of a mixed bag. There were total misfires like Inhumans. Well-liked but littlewatched spin-offs, like the Hayley Atwell-starring Agent Carter. Netflix shows such as Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and the one about that other bloke, which started strong but became increasingly plodding. Even the most successful, Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D., began in a blaze of glory, but by the time its seventh and final season ticked around in August, it had become a much smaller, weirder affair, divorced from the mothership of the MCU.
In fact, none of the shows, bar an odd cameo or throwaway comment here and there, plugged directly into the MCU; and even if they did, the door only swung one way. When, at the end of Avengers: Endgame, Doctor Strange assembles every hero in the MCU to kick Thanos’ arse, the likes of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and that other bloke were conspicuous by their absence. None of those shows, in short, was considered an essential part of the MCU. Perhaps it’s because they weren’t cinematic enough. Perhaps it’s because, crucially, none of them had Feige.
All of this is about to change in a major way. From December, the MCU is branching out onto the small screen with a string of ambitious shows that are more connected to and integrated with the movies than ever before. There’s The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, aka the continuing adventures of Bucky Barnes and Sam Wilson, the new owner of Captain America’s shield. There’s Loki, in which the trickster god travels through time. Hawkeye, in which Jeremy Renner finally grabs the solo spotlight. And it all kicks off with Wandavision, starring Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany as the MCU’S strangest couple, Wanda Maximoff and Vision. And Feige’s not just involved; his creative dabs are all over this. So, what changed? Why now?
“The why now is Disney+,” Feige tells Empire. At some point between Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, Feige had received a call about Disney’s streaming service. And not the sort of call the rest of us might get, extolling the virtues of a free month’s trial. This was an altogether more serious affair, involving the very head of Disney himself. No, not Mickey Mouse, the other fella. “Bob Iger had created Disney+, and asked us to start thinking about what we would want to do in terms of long-form narrative, in terms of series. It was the right thing at the right time.”
At that point, Feige had devoted the best part of 12 years
WHAT'S THE MOST IMPORTANT LETTER IN THE MCU?
to building the Infinity Saga, while his 20th anniversary at Marvel had come and gone. Nobody could have blamed him if he’d decided that there were no galaxies to conquer, packed up his action figures, and headed off in search of a new challenge. “Part of me was focused on finishing Endgame, and the other part of me was, ‘What’s next?’” he admits. “To have something new to do when you work for the same place for 20 years is a gift, and kind of amazing to have,” he says. “And ideas and concepts and dreams that we’d always had started pouring forth; things we’d wanted to do for quite a long time.”
For, as it turned out, Feige had a vision. And a Vision. And a vision involving a Vision.
IT WON’T SURPRISE YOU TO LEARN
that the guy who makes Marvel movies for a living is a nerd, but Feige’s got range. He’s a Marvel nerd, a Star Wars nerd, a movie musicals nerd, a Disney nerd and, just for good measure, a sitcoms nerd, too. “Nickelodeon was what we kids would watch during the day,” he explains. “And at night they would start showing old sitcoms. I loved TV, and watched far too much The Dick Van Dyke Show and I Love Lucy and Bewitched and everything. So I had a near unhealthy obsession with being raised by television, and now I can take that one remaining childhood obsession and try to turn it into something productive.”
Feige’s idea was simple: that Wandavision should lean heavily into the very notion of being a TV show (“This is why we could not have made this as a movie,” he says), by taking the star-crossed Avengers-cum-lovers who put the power into “power couple” and whose relationship came to a tragic end in Infinity War, and dumping them into what appears to be the middle of a TV show. One in which they’re reunited, happily married, and living in a state of domestic bliss in what looks and feels like a suburbia ripped straight from a 1950s sitcom.
There is a side of Wandavision that is more traditionally MCU, action-packed and effects-laden. This is the first Marvel show to bring the deep knowledge and deeper pockets of the movie arm to bear, after all. “Big-screen MCU is a genre unto itself now, in a certain way,” says Feige. “That’s something we play with in this series.”
But when they’re in Sitcomville, the show is absolutely rooted in the grand tradition and history of the great American sitcom. So much so that the series’ director, Matt Shakman, who had appeared in a number of sitcoms as a child actor, figured special training was in order. “We did a fabulous sitcom boot camp together,” says Shakman. Not quite as arduous as the sort Dale Dye sends people on when they have to pretend to be soldiers. “We spent over a week watching TV and trying out different styles and getting it into our bones.”
The first episode took just two days to shoot. Not because they’d forgotten to finish the script but because, in the grand tradition of multi-camera sitcoms, it was filmed in front of a live studio audience. “Oh, it was lovely,” laughs Olsen. “There’s something that was so delicious and fun about getting to do this type of performance. I don’t think I’ll ever have [another] opportunity to do quick changes backstage.” For all the piles of lovely Marvel money sloshing around, Shakman insisted on a lo-fi approach. “If magic happens like in Bewitched, they stayed true to how it would have happened on that set,” says Teyonah Parris, who plays Monica Rambeau, last seen as a young girl in Captain Marvel and now involved, somehow, as an adult in Wanda’s weird and wacky world. “Which meant using wires. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we’re going to CGI it in.’”
That first episode is the only time that an audience was bussed in (that’s a lot of NDAS to track), although it’s not the end of the sitcom shenanigans. At some point in Wandavision’s six episodes, the ’50s sitcom world surrounding our heroes will shift to the
’60s. Then the ’70s. And the ’80s, and so on. “It’s so fun to play with wigs,” laughs Kathryn Hahn, who plays Agnes, a nosy neighbour of Wanda and Vision’s who just might turn out to have ulterior motives. “My inner Tracey Ullman came through.” Whisking through the sitcom ages was one of the bedrocks of Feige’s brainchild. “Wanting to really dig into the sitcom styles over the decades was something that fascinated all of us,” says Feige. There’s a little Bewitched in there, a little The Brady Bunch, a little The Mary Tyler Moore Show. But it’s not just a nostalgia fest. “We go up to the Modern Family and The Office style,” reveals Feige. “The talk-to-the-camera, shaky-camera, documentary style.”
In case it wasn’t already clear, Wandavision is set to be a profoundly bonkers experience. “We’re swinging for the fences,” says Olsen. “I love risking stuff, so it’s fun to do that. But it’s a palatable amount of strange. It’s playful in its oddity and its strangeness.” Which, in some ways, could make it the perfect intro to Disney+ for the MCU. The initial plan for the streaming service, as had been announced, was to lead off with The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, but the coronavirus outbreak put paid to that. Now, instead of something that feels familiar and comforting and in the same milieu as the Captain America movies, the first piece of MCU content audiences will get for over a year will be a batshit-insane show that features a witch who gets it on with a robot. In the wrong hands, it could quite easily be an episode of Baywatch Nights. “Baywatch Nights?” laughs Feige. “We should be so lucky.”
In the right hands, though, it could be a show with much bigger things, and themes, on its mind.
VISION WAS DEAD, TO BEGIN WITH.
The last time we saw the loveable lug with a taste for paprika was towards the end of Avengers: Infinity War. There, he was bumped off rather unceremoniously by Thanos, fading to a lifeless, monochromatic grey after having the Mind Stone ripped from his forehead. It seemed that Bettany’s run in the MCU, which began with a voice gig as JARVIS, Tony Stark’s computer, in the original Iron Man in 2008, was over. “I remember being called in to meet with Kevin and Louis D’esposito,” says Bettany. “I assumed they were letting me go. ‘It’s been a great ride,’ all that stuff. But no,
I was pitched an idea by Kevin. And I was very excited to hear that I wasn’t entirely dead at that point.”
As for Wanda, she was last seen standing stoically by a lake at Tony Stark’s funeral, seemingly ready to move on. So, clearly something is rotten in the state of Wandavision. The MCU doesn’t tend to do straight-up adaptations of classic comic-book runs. But with Wandavision, there are a couple of key influences in play here. One is Tom King’s excellent The Vision limited series, which repositions the android Avenger in suburbia, and turns it into a disturbing meditation on what it means to be human; and the other is Brian Michael Bendis’ House Of M, an arc in which the volatile Wanda’s grip on reality breaks down to a universeshattering degree.
That’s one theory about their sitcom situation: that Wanda, stricken by grief, has built an alternate reality in which she and a resurrected Vision can live contentedly, filled with dinner parties and kindly neighbours and, somehow, even a couple of kids. Another is that Wanda is unwittingly at the heart of an experiment, pushing the limits of her reality-building powers for some reason.
Whatever the truth of their reality, it will give Olsen and Bettany the chance to play new notes. Throughout the MCU, as compelling and quirky as they’ve been, they’ve also very much played second fiddle to the Starks and the Rogers. Wandavision aims to rectify that by putting these two oddballs front and centre. “Paul and I have always taken care of our corner,” says Olsen. “But this time, it’s just that the whole story is her story. It’s not about fulfilling a piece of the puzzle, to help the larger picture. It’s been a dream opportunity where you’re like, ‘Oh, if I could do anything with this chapter, I would do this.’”
That perhaps also goes a long way to explaining how Feige has managed to persuade Olsen and Bettany to sign on for this. The stigma that once surrounded the small screen has long since disappeared, but it’s still quite something for actors who created characters specifically for movies to cross over to television. “I was really scared,” admits Olsen. “It made me feel a little wary, but because it’s something Feige is seeing through, I always say, ‘In Feige we trust.’ But I’m so happy that Paul and I had this opportunity, because it felt like unfinished business.”
How their relationship develops over the course of the show is anyone’s guess. Here, we find even more questions. How has Vision come back? Is he even really Vision? How significant is it that both characters were essentially given their powers by the same Infinity Stone? How will Wanda react if and when she discovers the truth about her reality? It’s through this relationship that Wandavision, amidst all the giggles and the gags and the bits outside the sitcom bubble, will tackle those big questions, and
perhaps even serve as a metaphor for mental health, and coping with trauma. “The key to the show is the love story,” says head writer Jac Schaeffer. “There’s a purity to them, and to their connection. But it’s very much about Wanda coming to more of an understanding about who she is, where she comes from, and what she’s capable of.”
There’s the rub. As Phase Four (not to be confused with Saul Bass’ 1974 cult horror Phase IV, although both have plenty of ants) of the MCU clicks slowly into gear, Wanda and her realityshifting powers are going to become more important. That moment in Endgame where, driven by grief and vengeance, she practically made Thanos soil his purple pants is just the beginning. “If you look at the Infinity Saga, I don’t think any single person has gone through more pain and trauma than Wanda Maximoff,” says Feige. “And no character seems to be as powerful as Wanda Maximoff. And no character has a power-set that is as ill-defined and unexplored as Wanda Maximoff. So it seemed exploring that would be worthwhile post-endgame. Who else is aware of that power? Where did it come from? Did the Mind Stone unlock it?”
By the time you read this, Olsen will be in London shooting Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, a sequel that, judging by the title, seems set to play a huge role in opening up the MCU to all kinds of different realities. And Wanda might be the key. “I’ve spent the last year with Wanda,” says a tightlipped Olsen. “And it’s actually incredible to go back-to-back because I feel I can contribute so much more now.”
More questions, still. Endless amounts of questions, piled on top of questions: how that will play out, how Wandavision ties into it, whether or not Vision will pop up again. Answers are a little harder to come by right now, but as Olsen said, in Feige we trust. After all, he’s the man with a vision. And a Vision. And a vision involving a Vision.