While the first season of Marvel’s What If? has transformed from a simple anthology series of tales from alternate realities—call them the Marvel Non-Cinematic Universes, if you will—it’s certainly become a giant, over-arcing story about a group of heroes coming together to fight what seems to be an all-powerful villain. It’s been fun, but it’s certainly familiar at this point. So even though the first season of What If? concludes tomorrow on Disney+, we’re certainly interested in what the show’s creators have in mind next.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, head writer A.C. Bradley says the scripts for the show’s next season have already been written, despite the fact that season one hasn’t officially ended yet. And rather than building a new group of “What If-vengers” to save the various MNCUs, they’ll “focus a lot more on the character stories and these heroes and showing a different side of them that people don’t expect and hopefully they can relate to.”
Bradley added: “Going into the second season, we’re sticking with anthology form, and it’s going to be all-new stories, lots of fun, new heroes, and pulling more from Phase Four than we were obviously able to this season. Hopefully, we’ll see hints of Eternals and Shang-Chi and the Black Widow characters. The fun of What If...? is that we get to explore the entire infinite multiverse, so we try and bounce around as much as we can.”
While it’s a pet peeve of mine when creators say they “hopefully” get to do something when they clearly already know the answer (“Gee, I hope Kevin Feige lets us use a Marvel movie character Disney owns so there are no rights clearances needed and also the story approval was surely given months ago and animation is most likely already underway but still cross your fingers!”), I like the idea of What If? looking beyond the Infinity Saga. And after big events like “Marvel Zombies” and “Let’s Murder All the Avengers,” some small, character-focused stories where neither a universe nor Tony Stark dies sound good to us.
Meanwhile, if you what to hear the brutal way Dr. Strange was going to die in “What If... Dr. Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?” head over to EW for the rest of the interview. What If? season one ends tomorrow, October 6, on Disney+.
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