WandaVision and the Art of Corporate World-Building

The show is a creative way to set up the next phase of the MCU. What if it could stand on its own?

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I am no defender of comic book movies and TV shows, especially those from Marvel. While entertaining, they can be a bit empty and have grown bland over time. I’d planned never to watch another Marvel property again after Avengers: Endgame, but then along came WandaVision. I was intrigued.

For those familiar with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the show’s premise and early episodes feel like a major departure. Marvel has devoted entire films to telling a particular character’s origin story, but opens WandaVision by dropping two Avengers into a strange place and the wrong decade without explanation. The movies take superheroes on quests to dark corners of outer space, but the show is confined to a small town in New Jersey.

The movies are action flicks full of explosions and battles. But in WandaVision’s first episode, viewers are treated to a 1950s-era sitcom starring Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany). Wait, what? Wanda, a sorceress with superpowers, and Vision, an AI android whose body is made of vibranium, both came to the MCU in Avengers: Age of Ultron. They later fell in love. But (spoiler alert!) Vision died in Endgame, so what is he doing alive and well in the 1950s with Wanda and a boring desk job?

At first, it seems like even Wanda and Vision aren’t quite sure. They fail at polite small talk when dinner guests ask benign questions about their past. They know they are different—Wanda cheekily signals to Vision to transform from his android self to a human on his way out the door, and we see that even superpowers can’t help her in the kitchen—but the early episodes present no context as to why they are in living in a small town, in the past, or why time keeps jumping.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Nick H

    When the "Big Bad" was revealed to be Agnes, my thought was that it was Wanda writing that into her story, that she made it all up too. Based on how it ended they're treating her as an actual witch, but that doesn't exactly fit in with how the show portrayed Agnes in the first several episodes, especially the scene where Vision finds Agnes sitting in a car on the edge of town trying to leave. Just a thought.

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  2. Brain Slug

    While I appreciate the critique, I think it’s a little harsh. Having watched the entire series straight through twice, my prediction is that wandavision will age very, very well. It is an extraordinary reflection on the evolution of the American TV sitcom over the last five-plus decades. It’s one of the most creative things I have seen on the small screen in years.

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    Jason Gibson

    Alec you doubled down on the Scorsese

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    BestUsedCarSales

    I've noticed that very little mention is made that this is based off a comic book by Tom King. I guess even Tom King himself wasn't involved with the television show.

    It's a good comic though. Tom King is a good writer. It's a shame. I sometimes hope people will come check them out more. There's good stuff and bad stuff, but comics can still be fun.

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  5. Commdoc

    Dent wants the MCU films and series to be opportunities of cinema art and is frustrated that WandaVision was compromised by the writers being forced to consider spin-offs possibilities and obligations to the wider universe. I doubt the creative team behind the series would agree. Because this has always been the intention from the first Iron Man with its inclusion of Nick Fury, S.H.I.E.L.D. and other hints of a wider world beyond Tony Stark. That was part of its original appeal--it teased other characters and stories. Marvel Comics' great innovation, via Stan Lee, was that The Fantastic Four lived in the same world as Spider-Man and other characters and that what happened in one title could impact others. That is the genius of Feige's oversight of the MCU--to create continuity that builds over time. That is the MCU mandate--it rewards various audiences: comics readers get to ponder how an MCU movie will be both like and different from its comics source. Newcomers can enjoy just the growing universe of well-told stories. Each film can be enjoyed for its engaging narrative alone as well as for its connection to the larger universe. That is the franchise's value proposition--it's a franchise of franchises realized by top talent.

    To charge that the MCU "perverts the art of cinema," as if WandaVision should stand alone as some sort of indie project as a director's personal, er, vision, is to ask Marvel productions to deny their intrinsic design of interconnectedness and one of the chief sources of delight for its audiences. The story's meaning and themes are enhanced by its back story, not hindered--try to imagine this story with no connection to anything else in the MCU. It would be drained of potency and richness. The series's episodic structure allows us to spend more time with one character's trauma and resolution in ways a film could not address. The interconnected narratives of the MCU is like the Infinity Stone in Vision's forehead; rip it out, and he won't stand alone; you kill him, he turns gray and falls to the ground.

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    Carson J.

    We've seen a million versions of shows that tackle emotional trauma and grief, and have no connections to past or future properties, but the single solitary one that is is weakened by it? I don't really buy that. What would a WandaVision separate from the MCU even look like? How would you market it? The main draw of the show is largely based on an already existing connection to the characters as they were established in previous films, then the mystery and emotional elements keep you hooked.
    This unique tackling of emotional problems in fiction with magical/supernatural/sci-fi symbolism is something I see occasionally in foreign properties, but almost never in domestic ones. Would I watch a show about a random magical girl who copes with her synthezoid boyfriend's death by taking a town captive and converting it into her perfect sitcom life? Probably, but I highly doubt it would boast the same size audience.

    TL;DR: Come for the larger Marvel story, stay for the emotional rollercoaster. I think it might have been better to withhold judgement on the show until the final episode airs in <6 days.

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    Nina

    I disagree overall with this essay. It sounds to me like an overall argument for the MCU to become like DC was for a long time. I doubt that people would be having the same emotional reaction to this show if it were a solo product. By drawing these less well know characters into the context of the MCU, it’s actually created a market for content about them.

    Just some examples: a comic centered around Jimmy Woo was recently canceled. But after being featured in WV, people are openly cheering for him to get his own Agents of Shield style show. People are asking about the original comics for Wanda and Vision and what they need to read to catch up (similar to how The Mandalorian boosted Clone Wars and Rebels, arguable much better shows). WandaVision may be just an entry into the MCU for now but it’s establishing a fan base for these characters that may last decades and is more likely to lead to (someday) a strict adaptation of House
    of M than any other combination of events.

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  8. Avatar photo
    Dr. Livesey

    It’s good to suspect the WandaVision writers made commercial decisions that could have hurt the artistry of the product. I think the way to evaluate that is to cite specific commercial decisions the storytellers made and specify how those decisions hurt the show. Did harm result? Was it minor or more serious?

    I’ve started watching “For All Mankind” on Apple TV, and it’s hard not to notice all the cans of Budweiser in the astronauts’ hands. It’s gotta be product placement, but it’s very consistent with the period (around 1970). It’s only slightly distracting and it further’s the artistic intention to show how different that time was from ours. So, no harm there.

    This case could be more insidious, and it’s good for readers/watchers to be alert to it, but frankly. If a few more really great shows get made because the costs could be brought down a bit from product placement, I think the extra Coke cans and Macbooks are worth it.

    Linking to other Marvel (or Disney) properties could have it’s own artistic rewards.

    This is also like censorship: Shakespeare couldn’t write some things about politics and monarchs, but he was able to succeed anyway, as did so many the great artists. Sonnets have tougher restraints on artistic decisions, so do moral considerations, so does political correctness and bias.

    There are always some restrictions, and it’s part of the artist’s job to respond. Sometime’s they’ll comply with, rebel against, satirize, work around (maybe with alusions that skirt the edge of a taboo, maybe in other ways) the restraints.

    And sometimes, maybe here, the constraints beat the artists. The case needs to be made each time.

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    BrandonAlleman

    I've been rewatching the Marvel movies in order and listening to the Binge Mode podcast after each. I'm surprised how much I am enjoying them the more I see the overlap between movies and realize that so much of the movies and shows actually comes from the text of actual comics. I was fan of comics growing up but revisiting them I'm reminded the pacing of comics is kinetic and the breadth of stories in the canon is pretty amazing. I look forward to watching WV after I rewatch Infinity Wars.

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    1. Avatar photo
      BrandonAlleman

      I hear you about the corporate world building, though. I loved the Mandalorian and the line it walked and am excited about the massive expansion of SW and Marvel content programed but also worry about saturation and cramming every story told into these frameworks. In defense of Marvel, the interaction, cross over implications, and constant layering of the comics and storylines was always part of their appeal. Dr. Strange was a part of WV in the comics, he delivered their twins.

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  10. Ingenero.lux

    That sounds about like my impression. I stopped watching the Marvel movies years ago when I began to see them trying to set up the “greater” universe - movies like the original “Iron Man” were self-contained and IMHO stronger for it, and when I saw them focus more on setting up for the next installment than storytelling (“Iron Man 2”, really), I ignored them until a friend put on “Guardian of the Galaxy” - which I disliked enough to continue ignoring them, right up until I started seeing ads for WandaVision. I have a soft spot for old TV, and when I looked into the show I ran into a Vox article praising the show for its early episodes, which were an excellent look at grief and spot-on parodies of earlier-era television.

    But as the MCU crept in, my interest has waned - even though Randall Park, who I think is hilarious and fantastic, came with the change. More technobabble than your typical episode of Star Trek, many strains of Unobtanium casually strewn about, and references to nefarious plots and terrible villains that do nothing to really advance the initial plot but do turn the thing into the video version of a conversation amongst my middle-school friends who loved X-men: an extended and inscrutable (to outsiders) conversation about side-changes, double-crosses, mysterious powers, and a never-ending fount of more comic books (or in this case, movies).

    I think there was a seed of potential greatness in this - and it became a commercial for the next twenty big-screen extravaganzas. I would like to see what this could have been without the MCU - there was room for much more, and that disappoints me. At least I got Disney Plus for the kids - that much has been worthwhile.

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