By Currently lined up to be the first Marvel original series to premiere on Disney+, new details on WandaVision have begun to spill out via a new Entertainment Weekly cover story, and things don’t look right as rain for ‘ol Vision.
Hinted in the brief teaser trailer dropped a few months ago, WandaVision won’t be playing by typical superhero rules, with a decidedly off-kilter tone. EW’s exclusive notes the use of a live audience during the filming of WandaVision; an attempt at capturing the 1950’s sit-com vibe the series looks to deconstruct, with its story of Vision (Paul Bettany) and Scarlet Witch’s (Elisabeth Olsen) not-so-normal marriage taking apparent cues from the likes of I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners, among others. The difference of course being that Lucy was never able to warp reality, and Jackie Gleason kept out of tights for his career.
The entire series isn’t beholden to the ’50s aesthetic, with a range of references that include “zany family shows of the ’90s.” WandaVision head writer Jac Schaeffer describes the series as “a love letter to the golden age of television.” It’s an easy way to pique interest in the project, with various films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe adopting genre labels (if I hear Winter Soldier described as a “70s political thriller” one more time…) as a means of discussing their particular flavor of tried-and-true superheroics, but the novelty of a Marvel TV series gives pause to any fears of the same-old. Could WandaVision be truly different?
Set for six episodes (compared to a “multi-issue comic-book run”) comprising a single season, WandaVision is the first of several planned series set for Disney+, expanding the MCU’s reach even further than the 23 already-released feature films. With The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and a Moon Knight series in the wings, WandaVision‘s eclectic style kicks off the next generation of Marvel cinema with what looks to be something fresh.
EW’s piece credits Marvel Chief Creative Officer Kevin Feige with the conception of WandaVision‘s idyllic-meets-surreal suburban premise, but the series would seem to strongly resemble Tom King and Gabriel Walta’s 2015 12-issue series The Vision, which similarly found our titular android coping with his inhumanity while trying to lead a normal, suburban life. Spoilers: Things don’t end well. The Vision won multiple comics industry awards, including the Eisner for Best Limited Series in 2017.
However much WandaVision might take from King’s series, the show will certainly fit into the larger MCU puzzle, with the surreal events said to take place after 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. Viewers of the epic finale might wonder exactly how Vision is up and running following, well, all of that, but that’s a mystery for the show to clarify. The series is also set to tie-in directly with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the supernatural sequel that looks to nab Sam Raimi for the director’s seat.
The full piece at Entertainment Weekly is well worth a read for MCU fans chomping at the bit for more content, with the next Marvel film–Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow–not set for release until March 7, 2021, following multiple coronavirus-induced delays, and the aforementioned Falcon and the Winter Soldier facing production delays also brought on by the pandemic.
No date is yet set for WandaVision‘s Disney+ premiere, but with the layers slowly peeling back fans likely don’t have too long to wait.
Source: Entertainment Weekly