The first big announcement for the MCU of the new year was that the upcoming Disney+ series WandaVision being moved from a 2021 release date to one in 2020. While the exact release date of the show remains murky, a few details that have managed to eek their way out of Disney and Marvel's airtight hold on story information suggest that this could be one of the MCU's biggest live-action gambles, and in turn potentially one of their bigger rewards.

Avengers: Endgame was undoubtedly a momentous occasion for Disney and Marvel Studios. The film sees the culmination of one of, if not the, most ambitious cinematic undertakings of all time. The movie pulled in over 2.7 billion dollars in box office revenue and solidified the Marvel movies as the definitive movie franchise of the 2010s. But there is a dark lining to this otherwise silver cloud. The decade is over, and the narrative rope with which the filmmakers at Marvel Studios have been pulling themselves through the last twelve years of storytelling has lost some of its most important threads. Without the Avengers at the forefront, Marvel's Phase Four offerings look to be equal parts exciting and discordant.

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It's into this Avenger-less vacuum that we throw the limited, knowledge that we have about WandaVision. The promo image from the 2020 Disney+ upcoming features teaser would suggest the series is Marvel's take on a classic sit-com, only, in this case, it stars Elizabeth Olson as the titular witch and Paul Bettany as the titular (resurrected? recreated? imagined? alternate... um... time-lined?) robot man. Based upon this, it would be safe to presume that the series is going to draw at least its stylistic inspiration from Tom King and Gabriel Walta's incredible Vision comic series. However, in addition to just the look of the upcoming show and some of the suburban sit-com feel, a recent comment by Paul Bettany at Disney's D23 Expo leads us to believe that some of the darkness present in King and Walta's run will be present in the show as well, saying that it begins in the sort of bucolic pie-on-the-window-sill tones of sit-com life but that it tumbles from there into a darker and more twisted narrative.

The folks at Marvel have stated that WandaVision is going to be unlike anything that they've ever done before. And for the most part that seems true, except that it shares one similarity that makes this bizarre-sounding show an incredibly important piece of the new MCU moving forward. This piece is that WandaVision is going to tie directly into the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. While the plot details of that film are mostly unknown, Kevin Feige has gone on record saying that while the sequel isn't a horror movie, it's scarier than the average Marvel film and it's going to introduce some important new characters to the MCU. Reports claim that the villain Nightmare could make an appearance in the film, which would make sense given Feige's comments about the fear factor and also could serve as a connection to the dark and twisted world spoken of by Bettany.

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Based upon this, and the collection of movies slated to be released so far (Blade for example), we can consider that the next major Marvel storyline could see a greater emphasis on the supernatural and mystical elements of the MCU. While all of this seems potentially disastrous -- all of this being a move away from the tried and true cataclysmic super-weapon style of superhero storytelling that has seemingly gotten the MCU to the point where it is today -- this radical shift could also serve as an unexpected source of new life for a franchise which some criticize as suffering from narrative homogeneity.

While it is true that the Avengers name can sell a movie ticket about as well as the Hulk's name can sell gigantic foam fists, a lot of the groundwork for the MCU was laid by titles that didn't have nearly as much name recognition. There was particular confusion when, after Iron Man, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger, Marvel announced Guardians of the Galaxy. In fact, most of the highlights of the MCU come from these sorts of gambles and genre-bending moments.

RELATED: WandaVision Set Photos Introduce The Space Agency SWORD To The MCU

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In the broadest stroke possible we could point out that it all began in an era where only the biggest Superhero name's could sell movie tickets -- Spider-Man, Batman, Superman -- but Marvel decided to stake what would become the largest continuous movie franchise of all time on Iron Man. To most of the public in 2008, Iron Man was, first and foremost, the title of a Black Sabbath song while some vague recollection of a metal man in McDonald's colors bobbed along somewhere in the depths of the pop-cultural consciousness. If you go back even further, to the man that started it all, Stan Lee created The Fantastic Four of his own accord because he was tired of writing westerns and romance comics. This is all to say that Marvel's biggest successes have always started out as its biggest gambles, and that is the risk that is being taken with this weird new super sit-com.

While the success of the MCU (and Marvel itself) has indeed been built thought a series of incredibly well calculated (and mostly well-executed) risks, those risks became slightly less severe over time when the studio had the safety-net of the Avengers to fall back on. In a sense the closure of Endgame has brought the MCU back to a beginning of sorts. The first generation brought characters like Peter Quill, Gammora, and Doctor Strange to levels of public awareness not dissimilar to that of the original Avengers back in 2012. Now the challenge is to use those characters as a support system while bringing together all of these other seemingly strange and disparate pieces into a cohesive and compelling narrative that feels both familiar enough to keep fans satisfied and unfamiliar enough to keep them genuinely invested. It was an a difficult trick the first time around and will undoubtedly be even more of a challenge to pull off a second time.

So, here we are, 2020, phase four. Tony Stark is dead, Steve Rogers is probably dead, and the pop-cultural behemoth that dominated the last decade has to start again. Marvel is placing its first foothold in an unlikely place in that all evidence would suggest that the next big narrative climb is going to begin, in large part, with the Studio's bizarre new Disney+ series, WandaVision.

KEEP READING: WandaVision Introduces A Character From King And Walta's Vision To The MCU