What If…? Is Marvel Cinematic Universe Canon With Complete Freedom

The entire Marvel Universe Canon is up for grabs in What If…? Comicbook.com’s Brandon Davis sat down with head writer A.C. Bradley and executive producer Brian Winderbaum for an exclusive interview. During that conversation, the duo revealed that they had complete freedom to tweak all sorts of aspects of the MCU. Now, this task is easier said than done because it’s very hard to come up with alternate timelines and not accidentally stumble upon the actual plans for the live-action films. In fact, in the interview, Bradley says that she ran into multiple instances of making story beats that ended up in the final entries of the Infinity Saga. it got to the point that the decision-makers at Marvel Studios just said, ‘Let her see Endgame, so we can all be on the same page.’ That admission also shows how long What If…? has been in the hopper. Check out what the creative team had to say down below:

“When I was brought onto What If, I was given mandate of ‘Go make 10 small Marvel movies. Go have fun. Just don’t do anything we’re already doing in the movies,’ which meant for the first three months, I walked face first into every Marvel project,” Bradley admitted. “Until finally there was a moment of ‘Let her see Endgame. This is getting cruel, and then lead her into the stuff we’re doing.’”

“So after that little trip, it was kind of like, okay, I can go weird. I can go different. I can take these characters in places that we’ve never even thought of going,” the head writer continued. “I can get in there and show Nick Fury having a crisis of faith. Like, is he on the right track? I can get in there and show a completely different side of Doctor Strange, really explore some meaty materials of loss and love.”

She added, “And for that, that was the greatest gift. For me, these characters are so iconic not because of just the silhouettes and the toys. It’s the heart, it’s the hero. It’s the finding the humanity behind the shield. So my job was to go in there and just find out why we love them. What is the human connection? And explore that in as many weird, cool ways as possible.”

Executive Brian Winderbaum also shared some insight on how Marvel Studios laid out the rule book at the beginning of the series.

“I mean, you’re completely unbounded from any sort of rules, which is both the most exciting and the most daunting thing about it, because then you have to create your own rules. But I mean, it really is, in many ways, the purest interpretation of the imagination of the people behind it,” he mused. “There’s an element of chaos in all things. There’s an element of chaos in animation. Certainly a major factor in live action. Filmmaking is chaos. And how things don’t go as planned and how you end up ultimately with a whole different set of tools than you thought you had going in. In an animation, kind of get to work with this infinite canvas where anything you want can be achieved. And if you can conceive it, you can do it. If you can dream it, you can do it.”

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