Kevin Smith praises the strong storylines and gorgeous animation of Marvel's What If...?. The American filmmaker is a known proponent of all-things-nerdy, often incorporating comic book references into his movies and even owning his own brick-and-mortar store in New Jersey. The Disney+ MCU series What If...? is currently in the midst of its first season, with a new episode releasing every Wednesday.
While Marvel Studios has spent nearly a decade developing the continuity of its film and TV universe, superhero comics are known for exploring alternate, parallel realities as a way to tell new stories with familiar characters, and What If...? is the MCU's way of doing so. Each animated episode centers on a scenario in which one key detail of the established storyline is altered, and explores the far-reaching consequences of this change. While not all of the principal cast members lend their voices to the series, several key players do, and this first season features the final performances of Black Panther actor Chadwick Boseman.
Now, on his FatMan Beyond LIVE podcast, Smith adds his voice to the chorus of fans enjoying the anthology series. The director starts out by saying he couldn't watch What If...? week-to-week because of his busy production schedule on a new film, but was recently able to watch all the episodes currently available in one sitting. The show so far gets a big thumbs up from Smith:
I did not watch 'What If...?' as they happened week by week because I was busy with my head up my own ass making a movie, so I got to watch them all in a row. F**king fantastic. Everything that I hoped that that series would be. Very movie centric which makes sense because those are the stories that the audience largely would know. It's not like you can do "What if Bullseye didn't kill Elektra?" a bunch of the audience would be like 'Wait, who are these people?' It makes sense that they're taking the 'What If...?' formula and applying it to the movie stories. I think that's the best chance they've got of capturing an audience. Helps that they're stunningly gorgeous pieces of animation on top of what I've felt are really strong stories.
He continues by singling out a couple of episodes he thought were particularly strong, starting with episode 4, "What If... Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?", which has Christine die in the car accident that in the films derailed Strange's career as a surgeon. "That Doctor Strange episode could have been Doctor Strange 2 in a less ambitious world where Kevin Feige wasn't like 'nah we got other plans,'" Smith says. "I wouldn't have complained if that was the whole f**king feature, and the most recent episode, 'What if Killmonger saved Tony Stark?' Fantastic, a fantastic re-investigation of a character..."
Smith's perspective as a superhero aficionado reveals the cleverness of Marvel's strategy with What If..., as well as the scope of their film universe. Though the animated series is informed by a comic book tradition, their intended audience is the MCU's own fanbase, which has grown beyond people who actually read the comics their characters are drawn from. That Marvel Studios has built enough to be able to reach back and tinker with their own past suggests that, like the comics themselves, the MCU will never run out of stories to tell.
Source: Fatman Beyond LIVE
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