DUBAI: There was a time when people thought superhero movies would be a fad. Marvel Studios has proved them wrong. Across 13 years and 23 movies, Marvel has found a way to dominate the box office and with it, global pop culture, keeping fans anxiously awaiting each new project from characters both fresh and familiar. Their secret? Make each film something more than just a superhero movie.
Hidden in nearly every one of their smash hits has been another genre altogether. “Spider-Man: Homecoming” (2017) was an ode to Eighties teen comedies. “Capitan America: The Winter Soldier” was, at its heart, a spy thriller. Even “Avengers: Endgame,” its biggest smash and the culmination of its first saga, was, by and large, a heist film.
“WandaVision,” the first Marvel Studios foray into the television format, which is now streaming as part of Disney+ on OSN, is not just a continuation of the story of the Scarlet Witch Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and her beloved partner and superpowered robot Vision (Paul Bettany). It is a show about television itself, both a love letter and a deconstruction of the sitcom.
“When I first heard of the concept of this show, I thought it was bananas, and brilliant,” says Bettany.
The story is both simple and mysterious: Wanda and Vision are trapped in a small town with no memory of how they got there, finding themselves living inside of a 1950’s sitcom. Each episode evolves from there into the sitcom style of a different decade, moving through the Sixties and ending up in the 2000s.
“We start with the ‘Dick Van Dyke Show,’ and then ‘Bewitched’ and then we end up with sort of ‘Malcolm in the Middle’ and ‘Modern Family.’ You go from this incredibly warm 1950s American exceptional optimism to these very cynical, quite cool-in-tone shows,” says Bettany.
Marvel went to such lengths to recreate the format that they even brought in a studio audience and filmed on the same studio sets on which iconic sitcoms had been filmed in the past.
“It was quite thrilling to be on there. I’d say, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s where they filmed ‘Bewitched,’ or that’s where they shot ‘The Brady Bunch’!’ It was very, very cool,” says Emma Caulfield, who plays Dottie, one of the townspeople who she hints will evolve into something else.
The creators also recruited sitcom heavyweights including Debra Jo Rupp, who played Kitty Forman on the hit 2000s comedy “That 70s Show,” as well as Alice Knight Buffay, Phoebe’s sister-in-law, on “Friends.” Initially, though, Rupp was going to say no.
“I talked to my great-nephew, who is 15, and he said, ‘Aunt Debbie, if you don’t do this, you will never see me again.’ So I did it, and I’m so happy that I did,” says Rupp.
Underneath it all, it’s a mystery as to what is really going on in “WandaVision.” The last time we saw Bettany’s character Vision in the cinema, for example, he was dead, as the all-powerful infinity stone that gave him life was plucked from his forehead so that the evil Thanos could complete his collection. While fans will have to wait through the nine weekly episodes to find out what led the two heroes to where they now are, the sitcom format allows them to slowly explore their characters in a way we never go to when they had supporting roles in the “Avengers” films.
“The whole fabric of this show is built on what we have already made, and so to get to burst that open and get really specific with their life experiences throughout this show was really an incredible opportunity for both of us. It allowed for us to complicate these characters even more than we’ve been able to,” says Olsen.
The show doesn’t just succeed by pulling genres out of a hat. Rather, it finds ways to lean on the history of film and television storytelling to develop the characters. At its heart, the unique structure of “WandaVision” is in service of Wanda and Vision’s story, finding a way to deftly weave experimentation with heart and humor.
“(Marvel) found every traditional way of telling a narrative and just make it intricate and unexpected and huge and cover all the bases,” says Oscar-winning songwriter Kristen Anderson-Lopez, who wrote an original theme for each episode of “WandaVision” along with her husband Bobby Lopez. “Now they’ve just upped the game by playing with concept. They already had a PhD in storytelling — this is a Post-Doctorate. I was just so thrilled to be like the icing on the cupcake of that incredible storytelling.”
