Marvel's TV boss promised standalone shows, then Disney+ assigned eight titles of VisionQuest homework
Marvel's TV boss says its shows should work like comic books: pick one, skip the rest. One title on the official list doesn't even have Vision in it.
On 14 October, hours after the first two episodes of VisionQuest landed, Disney+ published its own guide to what you should watch before pressing play. It runs to eight titles. The first is Iron Man, from 2008, a film old enough to predate the iPad.
The timing is awkward. Days earlier, at New York Comic Con, Brad Winderbaum, who runs television, streaming and animation at Marvel, told Collider that the studio had learned its lesson on crossovers. The model now is comic books, where you follow one character without buying every other title on the shelf.
"If you're a fan of Daredevil, you can watch Daredevil. If you're a fan of VisionQuest or the WandaVision trilogy, you can watch that. And if you watch them both, you might find some unexpected connections."
— Brad Winderbaum, Marvel's head of television, streaming and animation, to Collider
Read the small print, though. Even in the pitch for standalone viewing, VisionQuest comes bundled with "the WandaVision trilogy". The promise had a footnote before Disney+ added a reading list to it.
Eight titles, and one of them has no Vision in it
Here is what Disney+ has set, in order. It is less a study guide than a tour of the back catalogue:
- The films: Iron Man (2008), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Captain America: Civil War (2016), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Avengers: Endgame (2019) and Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019).
- The series: WandaVision (2021) and Agatha All Along (2024).
Endgame is the cheeky one: Vision is dead for the entire film. Far From Home is Peter Parker's school trip to Europe. Neither is essential to a story about Vision, and both are, conveniently, on Disney+.
Read more: Vision has been an AI since 2015 — only now are critics holding it against VisionQuest
Inverse did the maths: about 25 hours of viewing, not counting VisionQuest's own eight episodes. Add its two optional extras, Agent Carter and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the total climbs to roughly 43 hours. One fan-run watch guide goes further still, with 23 titles and 59 hours. That is not homework. That is a dissertation.
Can you skip WandaVision?
My view: not really. At Comic Con, Winderbaum himself presented VisionQuest as the end of a trilogy that began with WandaVision and continued in Agatha All Along. Its Vision is the bleached-white copy built in WandaVision, and Tommy, the son he is learning to parent, came out of the same two shows. Coming to that cold is a bit of a stretch.
Marvel promised comic-book freedom and delivered a syllabus that starts before the iPad.
To be fair, not everyone agrees. On r/television, one of the top replies in a thread about spin-off fatigue argued that "Required is such an overblown word, people acting like these series would be incomprehensible without other shows." For a single series, that is often true: a decent show tells you who people are as it goes.
The catch is that Marvel no longer sells single series. It sells finales.
Avengers: Doomsday is the real exam
Avengers: Doomsday opens on 18 December in the US, with China getting it two days earlier, on 16 December. It brings Robert Downey Jr. back as Doctor Doom and puts the Fantastic Four, the Thunderbolts and Fox's X-Men in a single film, on top of a multiverse that Marvel spent years setting up on Disney+ as well as in cinemas, starting with Loki.
My bet: it will be the biggest piece of homework in MCU history. The viewer who never subscribed to Disney+ will buy a ticket in December and spend the film asking who all these people are. If eight titles is the reading list for a TV finale, nobody should be surprised when the Avengers send one too.
Winderbaum wants Marvel to work like comic books. Comic books, as far as anyone remembers, never sent anyone a reading list on release day.
Read more: Jeremy Renner isn't in Avengers: Doomsday and already knows who to blame when the Avengers lose