Marvel's What If…? Season 3 Includes Surprising MCU Cameos

Marvel's What If…? Season 3 will have some more cameos than people expect. Marvel Studios head of streaming Brad Winderbaum joined ComicBook.com's Phase Zero podcast to talk X-Men '97. While talking about the mutants big MCU debut in animation, the executive mentioned that their anthology series might be bending the rules this season. Usually, Marvel makes a point to have characters debut in live-action first before making the leap to cartoons. Now, that line will be blurring a bit with What If…? Season 3. Sadly, this rule is largely why the X-Men haven't popped-up in Marvel Studios animation before now.

Winderbaum revealed, "Actually, in the third season, spoiler alert, we do start to push at that boundary a little bit more. There's more fun to be had with the Multiverse and who can kind of come in."

"Well, actually, it was kind of liberating to be able to stay in the 90s," Winderbaum said. "It allowed us to go places that we could just do what we want. To be so iterative. Things that we couldn't do if we were more MCU adjacent like What If…? is. I mean, What If…? Is like we're literally remixing the MCU. So, it's harder to introduce characters. Because you want to see them in live-action. Although, we do see Bill Foster as Giant Man in the second season. That's new!"

Why Haven't The X-Men Appeared In What If…? Yet?

Way back when What If…? Season 2 premiered, ComicBook.com talked to the creative team about this very topic. When asked why the X-Men couldn't appear, creators Bryan Andrews and A.C. Bradley had to break this down for us. Basically, characters used to have to have those live-action spotlight moments before they could begin messing with variants. 

"They were pretty much off the table," Andrews told us. "They're like, 'We got to do it first in live action and then you get to do it.' And we're like, 'Ah, man!' We would've loved to have played with all kinds of toys. But there's limitations."

"It's also why we couldn't do Sam Wilson's Captain America because we didn't know when that would be coming out," Bradley added. "We were writing season two, season one of The Falcon of The Winter Soldier were shooting, paused shooting, the scripts were being rewritten because of other things, and we were like, we don't know when anything's airing, so we couldn't touch it because we're not allowed to introduce... It makes sense. Let the character live in live action first and then come play in the multiverse."

Nova Coming To The MCU?

Elsewhere in our sit-down, Winderbaum also had some massive news about Nova. He revealed to ComicBook.com that Marvel Studios is currently developing a project centered on the hero. Things are still in the early stages, but this has been on a lot of fans' wishlists for a while now. At this point a lot of them don't even care which Nova it is. They just want to see the hero on-screen sometime before Avengers: Secret Wars. 

 "We love Nova. We are in really early development on Nova. We have a new system behind-the-scenes at Marvel Studios," Winderbaum shared. "We're more like a traditional studio now. We're developing more than we actually will produce. There are plans to develop Nova. I love Nova, too. I love Rich Rider, too. I hope it gets to the screen. The world is always chaos. There's always things. You gotta conjure these things to make them happen but I would love to see a Nova show, one day."

Who do you want to see in What If…? Season 3? Let us know down in the comments!