How Marvel expands 'the WandaVision corner' of the MCU with Agatha All Along and Vision Quest

The first scene of new Disney+ series Agatha All Along brings back Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda Maximoff in name only. Kathryn Hahn's theatrical sorceress Agatha Harkness is still trapped in the town of Westview, under the spell that the Scarlet Witch placed on her in the season finale of 2021's WandaVision, but this time she's stuck in her own Mare of Easttown. Agatha is forced to live out a true-crime drama as a detective investigating the murder of a young Jane Doe. Though you never see her face, you see her blackened fingertips (a side effect of fiddling with a certain dark spellbook) and Agatha later discovers the victim's identity as "W. Maximoff."

Showrunner Jac Schaeffer says there was "a lot of consideration" about how much Wanda's shadow would have in the sequel series, coming to Disney+ this Sep. 18.

"That's a great way of articulating it: her shadow," she tells Entertainment Weekly in an interview. "Agatha is not a character who's going to stand in anyone's shadow. This is emphatically an Agatha Harkness show. However, we are in the WandaVision corner of the universe, so Wanda's legacy has threads in this narrative."

After the success of WandaVision, Schaeffer was invited to develop another series for Marvel. She says she pursued "a lot of different ideas," including a spinoff about Paul Bettany's Vision, Maximoff's robot lover.

"We're always having multiple conversations and developing more than we make," Brad Winderbaum, the head of Marvel TV, comments to EW in a separate chat. "It was a lot of ideation of this and that," Schaeffer adds. "Every idea that I had was, X character does this and then Agatha shows up. Over time, it became so abundantly clear that the show I was meant to do was Agatha all along." 

The Vision concept still lives. Star Trek: Picard's final season showrunner Terry Matalas now spearheads what is called Vision Quest, which follows Bettany's "White Vision," the weaponized copy of the original Vision created to destroy Wanda during WandaVision. James Spader's Ultron, who's basically the android's father, will also return for the show about this new Vision facing an identity crisis as he grapples with the memories of the original.

"[Matalas] and Jac have talked, and that show is really a love letter to everything that Jac built before and also continues on in a way that's unique to that filmmaker," Winderbaum explains. "There is a long tradition in Marvel, whether it was [director] Shane Black taking the baton from [Iron Man and Iron Man 2 filmmaker] Jon Favreau for Iron Man 3, or the Russos taking the baton [from Joss Whedon] in Avengers. Just like the comics, these franchises benefit from different storytellers, different artists playing with the material in new ways."

These two shows will broaden what Schaeffer refers to as "the WandaVision corner" of the MCU, and Winderbaum says Agatha All Along, titled after Hahn's chart-topping song of the same name as performed in that first series, "really led the charge."

The premise kicks off when a mysterious goth teen who's obsessed with witchcraft (Joe Locke) helps Agatha break free of Wanda's spell, only now she's completely left without her powers. This "Teen," who's been hexed by...someone so that he can never share his name or any identifying information with other witches, plants the idea of traversing the Witches' Road, a mystical realm that faces wanderers with deadly trials. If conquered, Agatha could regain all her magic once more. She just needs a coven to pull it off. Enter Aubrey Plaza's Rio Vidal, Patti LuPone's Lilia Calderu, Sasheer Zamata's Jennifer Kale, and Ali Ahn's Alice Wu-Gulliver.

"So much of television is about a call and response to the audience," Winderbaum says, noting how the response to Hahn's Agatha and her "Agatha All Along" song in WandaVision "excited all of us."

Schaeffer declines to say what exactly those other ideas for WandaVision continuations were about. Some of that is just because "of how Marvel works," she mentions, but it's also because "some of the things that I was talking about have other lives elsewhere."

"I feel really lucky to have been given the task of defining witchcraft in the MCU," Schaeffer continues. "That was the thing: Wanda's the Scarlet Witch, but she kind of knows nothing about witchcraft. So then to go to the show and be like, 'Here's where we define it for you,' it was a real honor. As a fan, I am very hopeful that is the jumping off point that we will get to see more, which is more magic and more of the Westview community and this corner of the MCU in other properties."

In the beginning of Marvel's TV era on Disney+, the idea was to create shows that tied directly into the movies. "Now," Winderbaum says, "we are thinking about television really more like traditional television where they could last for multiple seasons, where we can see the characters brew in the culture for hopefully many years."

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

Marvel is also changing how it develops TV shows.

"One thing we are doing is we're developing a lot of shows now simultaneously," Winderbaum mentions. "So, in a way, we're making television more in a traditional style where we are going to write multiple pilots and show bibles before we decide what we want to produce and actually bring to the screen, which gives us an opportunity to experiment and also to plan all sorts of different Marvel sandboxes."