If you think Marvel’s first TV shows are just going to be like their movies, but on a small screen, think again.
After dominating cinema pop culture for the past decade, Marvel Studios is set to conquer the small screen.
With no less than six streaming series to debut this year, the first of these, WandaVision, is tantalisingly close. Set to start this Friday on Disney+, the series is new ground for a studio that has cleared almost $US23 billion at the global box office with its slate of superhero blockbusters, collectively known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
And with no new Marvel movies for the past 18 months, the anticipation for WandaVision is hot.
But if you think you’re going to see more of the same, but just on the small screen, think again.
“When I first heard it was television, that confused me,” WandaVision star Elizabeth Olsen told news.com.au. “This whole Disney+ Marvel thing hadn’t been expressed to the world at all and so it was news to me. And then [Marvel Studios boss] Kevin Feige told me his concept and initial idea and I just loved it.”
WandaVision wasn’t intended to be the first MCU series on Disney+, that was to be Falcon and Winter Soldier but with the coronavirus pandemic disrupting productions, WandaVision was the first series to finish filming.
In hindsight, it feels as if was meant to work out that way because WandaVision isn’t just a nine-episode story that comes out weekly, the DNA of its story is entrenched in television.
If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ll know by now that the trippy series seems to exist in a pocket universe of sorts in which Wanda and Vision are a married suburban couple who are aware of their powers but not necessarily their backstory.
And this is all played out through the filter of family sitcoms from every TV era starting in the 1950s. It’s an homage to the likes of Bewitched, I Love Lucy, The Brady Bunch, Leave it to Beaver, The Dick Van Dyke Show and more, all the way, so the filmmakers promise, to modern day.
While the mystery that runs through it, the “real world” framework of a post-blip Avengers universe, is influenced by The Twilight Zone.
Feige said that the idea with the MCU Disney+ shows was to do something you couldn’t do within the limits of a feature.
“It plays with the format and it plays with the medium,” Feige said in a virtual press conference this week. “There were a lot of meetings before people actually understood what we were trying to go for and we’re sitting here because [writer] Jac [Shaeffer] and [director] Matt [Shakman] did. And we’re able to turn a wacky idea into a spectacular show.
“[The TV medium] has allowed us to creatively expand what we do. I hope it says, ‘get ready for the new and the different’.
“We have things that you will only be able to see initially in theatres, that are made for that, and this is very much to be seen week after week on television, which is very different for us.
“We want to make people understand that these projects on Disney+ are as important as the projects going into theatres.”
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To that end, Feige said he’s looked to how the Star Wars and Disney+ teams have managed to make TV series The Mandalorian feel like an event. In particular, he pointed to Disney’s decision to release The Mandalorian weekly rather than all at once.
“I think it was very smart to do that because that conversation that happens every week, between episodes, is very important. Each time I witnessed that, it had me excited for the way we were building WandaVision.”
That love for episodic television is translated through WandaVision’s tributes to sitcoms of the past, which Feige emphasised aren’t parodies or satire.
“I watched too much TV as a kid and TV meant a lot to me and I found comfort in TV families. We love these things and they meant a lot to us, as dated and silly as they may seem now, there is a comfort factor there.”
That comfort factor plays directly into WandaVision’s narrative and why audiences find themselves watching Wanda play house with Vision in a sparkling homemaker set-up.
As a character who has experienced immense trauma within the world of the MCU, and with the ability to bend reality to her will, Olsen told news.com.au that what we see in WandaVision is the superhero trying to “protect this reality and hold on it”.
“Because in these sitcoms, we get to watch people have small resolutions,” she continued. “The whole episode is about something that seems so small but they make it such a big deal and when they resolve it at the end, everything feels better.
“And her life is anything but small resolutions. So, I think that’s what we’re holding on to in these sitcoms, the simpler things in life that give us joy.”
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It’s easy to see why Wanda would be tempted to live in a world where the most pressing matter at hand is Vision accidentally swallowing gum, and not how to defeat a genocidal villain with the view to wipe out half the universe’s population.
Olsen, 31, has her own connection to beloved family sitcoms. She’s the younger sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, the twins from Full House.
She didn’t ask her sisters for tips – “because we’re not doing that” – on the ins-and-outs of a multi-cam sitcom set-up or filming in front of a live studio audience which WandaVision did for the pilot, but she does have early memories of being on the Full House set.
“[Full House] was my after-school care, but I was so young,” she recalled. “That show ended when my sisters were nine and I was six, so they’re really early memories of location. Like, I remember the stages, the craft service area, what the dressing rooms felt like, and the emcee who would get audiences excited.
“That’s really what I remember from it, not the actual shooting of the actual stuff. But there is this wild meta experience of just how it all came full circle. [Director] Matt Shakman, who was a child sitcom actor, he had shot on the back lots that we shot when he was a kid and [co-star] Kathryn Hahn’s first job out of college was on a multi-cam sitcom.
“There were so many weird meta moments that we found, this thing that connected us all to these sitcoms.”
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Olsen has been in the MCU since 2015 film Avengers: Age of Ultron (with a small post-credits cameo in Captain America: Winter Soldier the previous year). As Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch, she has been an integral part of the superhero team The Avengers, but until now, she has been part of an ensemble, and not the headline star.
While promoting WandaVision, Olsen is currently in production in London on Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness in which she reprises the character of Wanda. It’s expected the events of WandaVision will lead directly into the Doctor Strange sequel.
Despite the high-profile status that comes with being a regular in a Marvel production, she’s mostly worked in smaller films, including her breakout role at 21 in Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, eviscerating dark comedy Ingrid Goes Westand critically acclaimed Facebook series Sorry For Your Loss.
There’s a sense she’s deliberately chosen indie fare, perhaps preferring to be an actor and not a “celebrity”.
“I’m always intimidated before doing a Marvel project because there is this reality that more eyes will see me in a Marvel project than anything else I ever do, and that thought is intimidating,” she said. “But it is really fun storytelling, and we have such an incredible group with us, so you forget about the intimidating part and just try to do your job.”
Plus, the opportunity to explore in depth an ensemble character in her own environment in four-and-a-half hours instead of in stolen moments in a movie with a dozen other marquee characters was too tantalising.
“[WandaVision] left me with feeling quite a new sense of ownership,” Olsen said. “They really allowed me to be [a champion for Wanda] when we were developing the show. Jac Shaeffer was very keen on keeping me involved and getting my take and my opinion.
“Now with Doctor Strange 2, I really feel like I’m full owner of her. Before, I was more of a team player, like, ‘oh yeah, that’s a good idea, sure I’ll do that’ and I’ll try and think about how to make it fun or different for me and create a backstory.
“Now, I’m like ‘but this is where she is and this is who she is, and this is something she would be more likely to do’. It keeps growing, this ownership of her.”
WandaVision has also reinvigorated Olsen’s connection to the character but how much longer she’ll play her will depend on “the stories”.
“If you asked me how much longer I would be doing Wanda a few years ago, I would have said ‘I don’t know, I have no idea’, but this show really opened up a lot of possibilities and rebirthed my love for her.
“Now, getting to do Doctor Strange with her, it just feels like I can continue to evolve this woman.”
WandaVision starts streaming on Disney+ on Friday, January 15 at 7pm AEDT
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