Marvel Studios’ animation panel took place this morning at San Diego Comic-Con and revealed a lot of exciting information about Spider-Man: Freshman Year, X-Men ’97, and more. The panel also revealed the news that the second season of Marvel’s What If…? has been pushed to 2023. ComicBook.com‘s Brandon Davis attended the panel and learned some exciting information about the new season, including which characters will be showcased.
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According to the panel, there will be a Hela-centric episode, we will see Captain Carter meeting The Winter Soldier, a showdown between Odin and The Mandarin, and Tony Stark on Sakaar with Valkyrie and Hulk which is expected to feature a race scene. The footage shown at the con featured Black Widow, Captain Carter, and Hydra Stomper Steve walking through a town filled with robots that looked like humans from the 1960s. Other characters seen included Yondu, young Peter Parker, Red Guardian, Ego, Shang-Chi, Korg, Gamora, and The Grandmaster winking at a statue of himself. It looks like there will also be another confrontation between Thanos and Captain America, and Bucky will help Red Guardian. It also looks like there will be an episode set in 1602.
During the panel, it was revealed that the version of Captain Carter seen in Doctor Stranger in the Multiverse of Madness is not the same version from What If…?. “I think it’s important to point out, that’s not our Captain Carter,” executive producer Bryan Andrews explained. “That’s some variant version.” Executive producer Brad Winderbaum added, “Our Captain Carter wouldn’t have gone down like that.”
Previously, What If…? head writer A.C. Bradley promised that the missing Gamora episode from Season One will appear as a “prequel” episode in the upcoming season.
“We definitely will,” Bradley said when asked if we’ll see more of Gamora. “What happened with the Gamora episode, there was originally supposed to be — early on in the season — a Tony and Gamora-centric episode. However, due to COVID and production delays, one of our amazing, amazing animation houses around the globe got hit pretty hard by the pandemic. And we were left with two choices: push the entire season to later this year, or push this one episode to Season 2. We made the choice to push that episode to Season 2, and hoped that seeing Gamora in the finale serves as a teaser for what is to come. In season two, it’ll almost be like a little bit of a prequel, we’ll see how Tony and Gamora became friends, because those two don’t even interact in the main MCU universe.”
“Given all the upheaval that we’ve been through in the past two years, pushing an episode is nothing, and we completely understand,” Bradley continued. “Our animation houses have been absolute rock stars in pulling off this show.”
Stay tuned for more updates from Comic-Con 2022.
