They’re finally making a Vision show

In news that would’ve made perfect sense in 2021 after WandaVision racked up a bunch of Emmy nominations and is a bit more of a head-scratcher now that Marvel is on the decline, Disney+ is officially moving forward with a series about Vision. According to Variety, Star Trek: Picard executive producer Terry Matalas has been tapped as showrunner for the new show, which is slated to premiere in 2026. Bettany will reprise the role he first started playing as a voice actor in 2008 (as Jarvis in Iron Man) before being brought to life in Avengers: Age Of Ultron and getting killed off in Avengers: Infinity War.

When we last left Vision, he’d been resurrected in spirit by Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and in body by S.W.O.R.D. director Tyler Hayward (Josh Stamberg). At the end of WandaVision, original Vision bestowed his memories upon White Vision. Though the memories didn’t necessarily come with the associated emotions, i.e., his love for Wanda, he did stop trying to kill her and fled the scene, not to be puppeteered any longer by a government agency. Presumably, the new show will pick up with that version of the character and whatever he’s been up to since then.

A Vision series—appropriately if somewhat cornily titled Vision Quest—was first in development back in 2022. According to Deadline, that version of the show was about the new Vision “trying to regain his memory and humanity.” It was also rumored Olsen might reprise her role as Wanda, a.k.a. Scarlet Witch. (Her character also supposedly died in Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, but death is a slippery thing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.) It’s unclear how much of the vision (pun only somewhat intended) for that series will carry over into this new iteration. Like The Vision himself, this may be something of a Ship of Theseus situation.

This new show comes at a turning point for Marvel’s television strategy. With growing concern about “superhero fatigue” and the MCU slipping ever-so-slightly from its position at the top of the Hollywood food chain, Disney CEO Bob Iger proclaimed that too much Marvel TV had diluted the brand. The studio is supposedly scaling back now, but the “new” strategy strongly resembles the old strategy. That is, a pretty similar TV-to-movie release ratio as the pre-2020 schedule, and returning to the Marvel Television banner. The latter move is specifically meant to unshackle the Disney+ shows from the weight of all that MCU lore. “The characters still live and breathe in the same universe, but the interconnectivity is not so rigid that you need to watch Project A to understand Project B,” Brad Winderbaum, Marvel’s head of streaming, television and animation, told Variety. “The hope is that, like the comics, you can just pop in anywhere and have a satisfying experience. We’re trying to dispel the idea that you need to do any kind of setup work to watch anything else.”

It would appear that you do kind of have to watch Project A (WandaVision) to understand its spin-offs (the Vision show and the upcoming Agatha All Along). White Vision may be a mostly blank slate, but the character is inextricably tied to a lot of MCU worldbuilding. At the same time, Vision being a major MCU player could really boost a project’s profile—the character isn’t exactly a founding member of The Avengers, but he’s closer to an original member of the team than most of the other MCU stars right now. As Marvel struggles to get audiences invested in less well-known heroes, betting on Bettany to restore some familiarity is a wise move.