THE ODD COUPLE
AFTER 13 YEARS OF dominating the attention spans of global cinemagoers with its string of 23 box office successes, no one would hold it against Marvel Studios if it decided to lay off the gas a bit. But that’s not how the President of Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige, or his team of storytellers operate.
As Spider-Man: Far From Home closed Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2019, there was no rest for the weary. By the end of that summer, at both San Diego Comic-Con and D23 Expo, Feige had announced their even more aggressively ambitious slate for Phase Four, including an added slate of in-canon limited series to air exclusively on streaming service Disney+.
Among those series was WandaVision, featuring the return of Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany as the superheroes/lovers Wanda Maximoff and Vision. One of the many head-scratching details presented was a teaser image of the duo wearing ’50s-era clothing, seemingly plucked from the stage of a frothy Golden Age of Television sitcom. Weird, because audiences have only known the pair in contemporary stories. Plus there’s the major wrinkle of Vision being dead, since Thanos (Josh Brolin) ripped the Mind Stone from his head in Avengers: Infinity War.
That confusion hasn’t lessened much since, as Marvel Studios and Disney+ have been tight-lipped about any details, outside of what’s been parcelled out in teasers and trailers for the six-episode series, debuting this month. But SFX can now pull back the curtain more, starting by going back to 2018, when Feige officially put the show’s concept – the pair using sitcoms as an escape mechanism – in development with co-executive producer Mary Livanos.
“It was really exciting, beautiful and just shiny and full of promise, and noisy and insane”
“Research in general is something that I really enjoy doing as a producer,” Livanos tells SFX via phone, as she and her team in Los Angeles work to complete post-production. “I try to read all the comics, noting every appearance of each character that I deal with.”
It was during that process, Livanos says, that WandaVision’s cast expanded outside of the duo to also include a grown-up Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), who originated as a young girl in Captain Marvel. “Her inclusion in the series was a discovery, and not quite mapped out, but it’s really enriched the show.”
Other existing characters, like Kat Dennings’s Darcy Lewis and Randall Park’s FBI agent Jimmy Woo, as well as brand new ones, helped flesh out the treatment. The next step was finding the best candidate to write and showrun the series. Screenwriter Jac Schaeffer was originally brought into Marvel Studios by long-time executive producer (and former film school friend) Brad.
