Credit: Inside the MagicThe Marvel Cinematic Universe needs a new center, and it’s not going to be Iron Man. It’s going to be WandaVision.
While Iron Man (2008) may have kicked off the MCU with Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark learning the value of human life and to not trust Jeff Bridges, the character departed the franchise in Avengers: Endgame (2019). While Kevin Feige is paying RDJ somewhere in the region of $95 million to now portray Doctor Doom in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, it is just not the same.
Related: After Robert Downey Jr. Becomes Doctor Doom, Disney Has Found Iron Man’s Replacement
Instead, Marvel Studios needs to figure out who to build the franchise around next. For a brief moment, it seemed like it was going to be Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), who debuted with a billion-dollar box office gross in Captain Marvel (2019); a bro-ish backlash and the colossal flop of The Marvels (2023) late, and that no longer seems to be the case.
There always seems to be a good chance that the MCU will try to center on Spider-Man (Tom Holland), but having to lease the rights for the character from Sony Pictures seems to make that more complicated than Disney would really like.
The studio seems to be pulling an interesting move and not constructing the franchise around a character but a show. WandaVision, the very first MCU show to debut on Disney+ in 2019, was a critical and commercial hit, with Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) taking the lead in a genre-bending examination of trauma and survivor guilt, plus superpowers.
Now, it seems that WandaVision is turning to the primary launchpad for more and more MCU projects, making it the franchise’s de facto new center.
Show creator Jac Schaeffer has a new series coming out soon, Agatha All Along, that directly picks up with Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) still under the Scarlet Witch’s spell.
Schaeffer describes the new show (via Entertainment Weekly) as something of a “shadow” series to WandaVision, saying, “Agatha is not a character who’s going to stand in anyone’s shadow. This is emphatically an Agatha Harkness show. However, we are in the WandaVision corner of the universe, so Wanda’s legacy has threads in this narrative.”
Marvel TV head Brad Winderbaum describes another WandaVision spinoff, the upcoming Vision series starring Paul Bettany as the amnesiac white version of the android, as part of a long tradition in Marvel, whether it was [director] Shane Black taking the baton from Jon Favreau for Iron Man 3 (2013), or the Russos taking the baton [from Joss Whedon] in Avengers. Just like the comics, these franchises benefit from different storytellers, different artists playing with the material in new ways.”
Related: Report: New ‘Wandavision’ Series To Continue Without Lead Star
Prior to Agatha All Along and the new White Vision series, fans had already seen the expansion of the WandaVision franchise in The Marvels, which starred Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau, a new hero who gained powers during her confrontation with Wanda Maximoff and Agatha Harkness.
Who’s going to be next to turn out to be linked to the Scarlet Witch? Agatha, White Vision, the returning Ultron (James Spader), even Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds)? Everything seems to be coming back to WandaVision in some way or other.
Do you think that the MCU is becoming too dependent on lingering plot threads from WandaVision?