Marvel’s New Show Already Breaks An MCU Rule Only Introduced 3 Years Ago

The Marvel Cinematic Universe was built on its interconnectivity. In 2008, when the first two movies in the franchise were released, it made that promise to the audience. Not only did it do this with Iron Man‘s post-credit scene, starting off a major trend for the franchise, which promised the eventual arrival of The Avengers, but in The Incredible Hulk, when Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark appeared unannounced. It became one of the best secret weapons of the series as new movies were released and the hype train welcomed new members eager to catch up and be in the know.

What was once Marvel’s greatest asset, which made it the envy of Hollywood and franchises around the globe, eventually became its weakness, though. The extended continuity of the MCU and needing to know “Everything” before seeing something new became a crutch and was seen as a hurdle for newcomers rather than an opportunity to dive in. As a result, Marvel Studios debuted what they called “Marvel Spotlight,” a distinct label they would put on projects like this week’s Wonder Man, that didn’t require watching anything at all beforehand to enjoy. The trouble is that these rules aren’t exactly true.

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Marvel Spotlight Was Made for Projects With Loose Connections to the MCU

Marvel Spotlight, inspired by the anthology comic series of the same name from the 1970s, was first announced back in 2023, as a way to indicate that newcomers could jump right into the shows on Disney+ without having seen anything else from the MCU. The first series to carry the label was Echo, which, despite having a self-contained story that fits that definition, still came with plenty of references and connectivity to other Marvel shows. Did the story for Echo track if you hadn’t seen anything else? Perhaps. Did it help if you’d seen Marvel’s Hawkeye and Marvel’s Daredevil beforehand? Absolutely.

This brings us to Wonder Man, the new series starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. Like Echo before it, Wonder Man arrives as only the second “Marvel Spotlight” series to date in the MCU. It’s a distinction that makes sense on the surface, as the series introduces a brand new character and largely has no connectivity to upcoming movies like Avengers: Doomsday (that we know of). In short, you can watch the series without having seen anything that came before it and fully enjoy the story itself. But is that really true?

There are two key characters to Wonder Man that make this rule bend to an impossible length. The first is the return of Ben Kingsley as Trevor Slattery, the character who made his debut in 2013’s Iron Man 3. It’s worth noting that Slattery has one of the wildest arcs of the entire MCU, as his character was sold as being the longtime Iron Man villain “The Mandarin” in the marketing ahead of the sequel’s release, only for the film to reveal that Kingsley was actually playing an actor, Slattery, who was taking on the role of “The Mandarin” for the real villain. It was a rugpull that enraged fans.

His arc continued into a forgotten MCU Short film, “All Hail the King,” and even in 2021’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, where it was revealed he was a kidnapped prisoner of the REAL Mandarin. Suffice to say that is a tremendous amount of context that comes before the release of Wonder Man that MCU fans will have in their back pocket, and which newcomers will lack, no matter how the series explains it.

There’s another major piece of Wonder Man that is present in the show that doesn’t arrive in a vacuum: the Department of Damage Control. A staple of Marvel comics, this organization works as a clean-up crew to superhero antics and to monitor alleged super-power activity across the US. They appear as early as Spider-Man: Homecoming, but for Wonder Man specifically, the series brings back Arian Moayed as Agent P. Cleary, who has already appeared in both Spider-Man: No Way Home and the Disney+ series Ms. Marvel.

It’s worth noting that, yes, you don’t “have” to watch any of these projects that these characters appeared in beforehand to fully follow the narrative of Wonder Man, it is about an all-new character after all. But it’s becoming clear that the “Marvel Spotlight” distinction and its rules about connectivity to the larger MCU don’t really matter in the slightest. If anything, it’s giving fans the wrong impression that the connectivity this series has to anything else is so nebulous that they can skip it. Hopefully, that’s not the case for Wonder Man, though, as the series is already one of Marvel’s highest-rated shows of all-time.