Other Marvel Sitcoms We Could See After WandaVision
WandaVision marks the first of Marvel Studios' slate of programming intended to bring its big screen stars to streaming devices via Disney+, as well as the debut of a brand new format for the company. Yes, Marvel looks set to accomplish what Powerless, The Awesomes, and that bananas Justice League show from the '90s only dreamed of pulling off: the creation of a superhero sitcom with cultural staying power.
This is new ground for the MCU, and it has some fans wondering if it's something that the company will be doing more of in the future. During a press event, the studio's big man Kevin Feige was asked about Marvel's plans, and whether more episodic, slightly goofier fare was in the cards. "We'll see," Feige responded. "This was our test run." The studio president went on to note that the process of even pitching the series was a long one, since "the idea always was, yes, to do something that could not be done as a feature that plays with the format and plays with the medium."
That said, if WandaVision pans out — and early reviews seem to imply that it will — Marvel still has plenty of material that would fit the format like a glove.
Damage Control: Practical and fun!
WandaVision won't represent the first time that the studio has dipped its toe in the water of the sitcom genre. Back in 2015, ABC announced that they'd ordered a Damage Control adaptation in single-camera comedy format, but a final project failed to coalesce.
Damage Control was a decidedly bizarre and hilarious idea from the get-go. Debuting in 1988, the title characters were a team of blue collar workers based out of New York City, whose bailiwick was exactly what it says on the bottle: damage control. They were a construction firm specializing in rebuilding the near-daily catastrophic harm inherent in living in a world populated by showboating superhumans.
The exact details of what happened to the proposed sitcom have never been revealed, but there's certainly a trail of breadcrumbs. By late 2016, word on the series, which had been touted as possibly airing sometime that same year, had gone quiet. A year later, Damage Control made their big screen debut in the opening act of Spider-Man: Homecoming, setting Michael Keaton's Vulture on the path to poor life choices. It could be that Marvel brought the hammer down on the series because they saw potential for its characters in the mainstream MCU. An Office-style sitcom would be a great fit for the team, and with two dozen Marvel projects confirmed to be on the way, there'll be plenty of mayhem to keep Damage Control busy.
FF could bring Paul Rudd back to TV screens
Marvel is currently hip deep in the process of making a Hawkeye streaming series, and it looks like it'll be firmly anchored in the award-winning comic book written by Matt Fraction. The saga of Clint Barton, Kate Bishop, and Lucky the Pizza Dog weren't Fraction's only celebrated contributions to the universe, though. Back in 2013, Fraction took on a pair of big projects. The first, helming the Fantastic Four, led to some bonkers interdimensional adventures for Marvel's first family as they set out through the cosmos on a journey of scientific discovery.
Fantastic Four was a good time, but the best thing to come out of the series was its companion story, a 16-issue miniseries called FF. The setup: with the Fantastic Four gone, a quartet of replacement heroes were hand picked to take care of the group's interests, including the multi-species school they'd been running out of the Baxter Building.
A superpowered daycare is just good television, but the real selling point here might be the cast of characters who fill in for Reed and Ben. Mister Fantastic picks Scott Lang to replace him as head of the foundation, while Yancy Street's favorite son gets subbed in for by She-Hulk. A Paul Rudd/Tatiana Maslany sitcom about trying to take care of moloids, fish people, and the child clones of supervillains? That's money in the bank.
The Silver Surfer would make fine television
For most of his roughly 60 years of existence, the Silver Surfer has been a decent barometer for how seriously a person took comic books. Somehow never played for laughs, he rode a chrome surfboard through space, occasionally seeking out planets for a giant with a bucket for a head to nosh on. For the uninitiated, this was all very serious, and not a gag written by a stoned college dropout.
Then, in 2014, writer Dan Slott did something that nobody saw coming. Surgically extracting about 90% of the character's brooding unapproachability, he teamed the Surfer up with Dawn Greenwood, an Earth woman from Massachusetts, and sent the two on a series of unlikely friendship adventures. There were, flying in the face of traditional Silver Surfer stories, laughs.
If "immortal space deity hangs out with a nice human girl in space" sounds familiar, it's probably because that was the backbone that kept Doctor Who running for almost six decades — they even toss in a couple of references via Michael and Laura Allred's Kirby-esque artwork. And if "Doctor Who but with Marvel characters" doesn't come with a built-in audience, nothing does.
Howard the Duck deserves another shot
Here it is, the easy answer: Howard the Duck.
Right off the bat, nobody's arguing that watching the movie didn't feel like gazing lovingly into the barrel of a sandblaster. The major drag about that is that Howard the Duck has been one of Marvel's most consistently phenomenal characters since he first popped his head up in 1973. At his core, he's a pragmatist in a world of terrifying possibilities, often struggling to be taken seriously because, you know, he's a four-foot-tall duck. An anthropomorphic fowl, seemingly alone in his understanding that the universe is cruel, screaming out in support of practicality from a cigar-filled cartoon duck mouth.
We've already seen Howard briefly in the MCU, voiced by Seth Green in both Guardians of the Galaxy movies and appearing in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in Avengers: Endgame. There was even talk of an animated series, originally intended to air on Hulu alongside Patton Oswalt's M.O.D.O.K. show and eventually culminating in a team-up called The Offenders. While that project appears to be dead in the water, it feels like a given that we'll see Howard again soon. It just wouldn't be practical for Disney to skip out on the bill.