“Wonder Man,” the new TV series from Marvel Studios, was born partly from a joke.
One day on the set of the Marvel film “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” the director, Destin Daniel Cretton, remarked offhand to a producer that the studio could build a streaming series around the character Trevor Slattery, a ne’er-do-well actor played in the film as comic relief by the Oscar winner Ben Kingsley.
On a lark, the producer had the art department mock up a poster: “Trevor Goes to Hollywood.”
“And I was like, now we have to figure out how to do this show,” Cretton said.
Marvel had already been developing a show set in Hollywood around the character Simon Williams, who takes on the persona of Wonder Man. In the comics, Simon is a wealthy industrialist with superpowers who also happens to be a movie star. Kevin Feige, the Marvel Studios chief, wanted to invert that dynamic and make Simon (played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II on the show) an actor who just happened to have superpowers.
Instead of presenting Simon’s abilities as an asset, however, “what if we made the superpowers his problem,” said Brad Winderbaum, who oversees Marvel’s TV projects. “It never was designed to be: Let’s watch him beat up a bunch of bad guys.” Instead, Simon’s powers would be “the impediment to doing what he loves, which is acting,” he said.
Pairing this version of the character with Kingsley’s Trevor — introduced in “Iron Man 3” (2013) as a hapless libertine so desperate for acting work that he agrees to masquerade as a terrorist mastermind — was an irresistible idea.
“Destin and Kevin Feige asked me shortly after the premiere of ‘Shang-Chi,’” Kingsley recalled. “I think I said yes before they got to the end of the sentence.”
By late 2021, the studio started talking to potential showrunners, including Andrew Guest, a TV comedy veteran (“Community,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”) who had impressed Marvel executives with his last-minute rewrites on the 2021 series “Hawkeye.” He won the job with a pitch for a “Midnight Cowboy”-style tale in which Trevor befriends and mentors Simon as they hustle to land an audition for a remake of the classic superhero movie “Wonder Man.” He was especially struck by how willing, even eager, studio executives were to shake off the formula that had brought them so much success.
“They were like, ‘We don’t want this to feel like any of the other things we do,’” Guest said in November on the Disney lot. “When I turned in my first draft of the pilot, it was essentially what’s in the show — it’s a lot of people talking about acting,” he added. “No one ever turned to me and said, ‘Where’s the bad guy in third act?’” The mantra in the writers’ room, he said, was “What if FX was going to do a Marvel show?”
Instead of origin stories and computer-generated action scenes, Guest created a comedic character study “about two narcissists who learn to care about one other person — they don’t need to save the [expletive] world,” he said. “If they learn to make that baby step, and we believe it, then I’m thrilled.”
That grounded approach appealed to Abdul-Mateen, who was wary of taking on yet another comic book adaptation. He played the villain Black Manta in the 2018 DC superhero film “Aquaman” and its sequel, and won an Emmy as the über-powerful Doctor Manhattan on the 2019 HBO series “Watchmen.”
“I wanted to play a guy who can drink a glass of water — meaning, I wanted to be a real person,” Abdul-Mateen said. He treated the character “like a guy with anger management issues,” he added — Simon has to keep his superpowers bottled up because, in the world of the show, superpowered beings are barred from performing on film and TV. (A flashback episode, co-starring Josh Gad as himself, reveals why.)
It is probably a good time for Marvel, which has seen its cultural dominance wane since the peak of “Avengers: Endgame” in 2019, to try something new. Reports of audience “superhero fatigue” have circulated for several years, and none of the films in Marvel’s 2025 slate cleared $600 million in global box office grosses, a benchmark the studio used to sail by with ease.
“Wonder Man,” which Winderbaum said has “one of the lowest, if not the lowest, budget we’ve worked with” in TV, is still a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But its narrative connections to the M.C.U. — just Trevor and Arian Moayed’s Agent Cleary from “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and “Ms. Marvel” — are tenuous.
“This show shouldn’t require any homework,” Guest said. He recalled friends who worked on Marvel’s earliest shows for Disney+ telling him about having to scramble to include M.C.U. characters that wouldn’t conflict with Marvel’s other film and TV projects. “I was never asking, ‘Could the Hulk come in Episode 6?’”
Leaving behind the comfortable conventions of costumed derring-do, however, carries its own risks.
“Not everybody’s going to like it — let’s just say that right now,” Abdul-Mateen said before backtracking a little. Of course he hopes people like what he makes, but aiming only to please the widest possible audience, he said, “means that you skated down the middle and didn’t really take a chance.”
Cretton, who directed the first two episodes of “Wonder Man” and cocreated the show with Guest, shared a similar sentiment. “If you are expecting a typical superhero show, you’re probably not going to like this show,” he said. “If you are hoping for something a bit different, a bit weirder, maybe a little deeper, hopefully funny, I think you might love the show.”
It’s been an unusually long road for “Wonder Man” to reach viewers. Production was suspended for seven months during the Hollywood labor strikes, wrapping in March 2024; Guest said the series was ready for air roughly six months later.
But by then, after a string of commercial and critical failures from Marvel in 2023 (“Secret Invasion,” “The Marvels”), Disney had directed the studio to reduce its output significantly and space out what it had already shot. “Wonder Man” had to be shelved for over a year. (In July, Feige told reporters he was unhappy with the delay and noted that Marvel had completed “Wonder Man” before the premieres of similar shows from HBO and Apple TV, “The Franchise” and “The Studio.”)
All eight episodes of “Wonder Man” will finally debut on Tuesday night. The question now is whether there will be more of it. The final episode concludes with somewhat of a cliffhanger, and Guest already has thoughts for what a second season could look like. Winderbaum, however, said the studio would greenlight another season only if the show pulled “big, big numbers on Disney+” in terms of viewership.
Whatever the future holds, the people who made “Wonder Man” are delighted the show is able to exist at all. Kingsley brought up the speech he gave the cast and crew at the end of production.
“I remember very clearly saying that we have been allowed to present something to the camera that is uncategorizable, that is unique, that is fresh and that is bold and very touching: Don’t let the committee interfere with it,” he said. “What’s delighted me is that nothing has been compromised in the edit. It is exactly what we all as a group wanted it to be. That is really thrilling.”
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