It was Kevin Feige All Along: WandaVision series creator Jac Schaeffer reflects on the Marvel Chief Creative Officer’s idea to have ex-Avengers Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and the Vision (Paul Bettany) click through decades of classic television sitcoms in the first original series from Marvel Studios. Set just weeks after the events of Avengers: Endgame, the nine-episode series sees a grieving Wanda cast a spell over Westview, New Jersey, transforming the town — and its unwitting residents — into the setting and supporting cast of WandaVision, a sitcom where a happily married Wanda and Vision are raising twin sons Billy (Julian Hilliard) and Tommy Maximoff (Jett Klyne) in “TV Land.”
Videos by ComicBook.com
“The concept belongs to Kevin Feige. It was his idea to marry Wanda and Vision with the history of sitcoms,” Schaeffer told EW‘s The Awardist about the origins of WandaVision. “He is a Nick at Nite type of guy, and he — based on this very long history in the comics of Wanda and Vision in various domestic, suburban spheres — he thought those two things would go together.”
WandaVision is inspired in part by the classic Marvel Comics mini-series Vision and the Scarlet Witch — about the newlywed couple retiring to the suburbs of Leonia, New Jersey — and Tom King’s Vision Vol. 2, which reimagines the android Avenger as the patriarch of a synthezoid nuclear family.
“I was invited to pitch on the project and sort of bring shape to it,” added Schaeffer, who previously co-wrote Marvel Studios feature films Captain Marvel and Black Widow. “They knew that Wanda’s history, and her very intense legacy of loss in her personal life, would be an excellent emotional foundation for the show and her superpowers that have to do with reality manipulation, that it would be a terrific opportunity to unpack that and explore that more.”
Feige’s love for classic sitcoms that aired reruns on Nick at Nite, and the desire to take deeper dives into the Wanda and Vision characters outside of films like the Avengers franchise and superhero ensemble Captain America: Civil War, is the genesis behind WandaVision.
“What would give me comfort after school [and] comfort late at night were these television shows,” Feige previously told Variety. “It was the one aspect of my youth and sort of what turned me into, for better or for worse, the person I am today. We’d never been able to really utilize [that in the Marvel Cinematic Universe]. My love of all sorts of movies and genre movies has absolutely been poured into all 23 movies you’ve seen us make at Marvel Studios already, but that aspect of my past, we weren’t able to even consider necessarily being able to do anything with it.”
All episodes of WandaVision are now streaming on Disney+.
If you haven’t signed up for Disney+ yet, you can try it out here. Note: If you purchase one of the awesome, independently chosen products featured here, we may earn a small commission from the retailer. Thank you for your support.
Related Posts
-
Image courtesy of Marvel Studios
