Marvel's animated What If...? has packed a lot into its relatively short episodes, but that wasn't always the plan.
Head writer A.C. Bradley appeared on Deadline's Hero Nation podcast to discuss the series so far, which will air its eighth episode this Wednesday. While the anthology has been generally well-received by fans and critics, one complaint has been how much story is crammed into each episode. But according to Bradley, part of the runtime is due to the pandemic -- though the comics also informed the decision to a degree.
"What If...? comics ended abruptly and really dark to prove that the main timeline is the better timeline," Bradley said. "We’ve used that as our reason to cut stories off a little bit shorter. All these episodes could have been 45 minutes. Some of the animatics were 35 minutes, but due to animation and Covid, we cut them a little bit shorter than we would have liked."
The episodes have mirrored the comics by ending on cliffhangers that each tease a larger story. And it seems that all of those threads may actually come together in the season's final episode. It's also possible that the already announced second season could follow up on certain stories, while new methods of remotely making animated series may help the show to avoid the issues the pandemic has posed and craft longer episodes. For now, however, the show does still have one limit: the MCU.
"While we’re staying true to the comics that way, we couldn’t pull many original storylines because the mandate was 'Use the MCU characters,'" Bradley said. "For Marvel Zombies, we went back to the original run and pulled some of the storylines from that because it was so much fun and it’s a huge cult classic. So, when it came to adapting, you pick the best parts, but you can’t show every moment."
The episodes of What If...? so far have managed to honor certain comic book storylines while still offering spins on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But each has had to set up a completely new reality and tell its specific story within a short amount of time. The first episode, for instance, essentially retold an entire movie. The one episode that has been able to avoid this issue is the most recent, which merely needed to show Thor throwing a huge party -- full of Marvel Easter eggs and cameos -- and see him battle Carol Danvers, which Bradley said was the impetus for the whole story.
"That came from let’s do something fun and silly; one of the mandates for that one is we’d love to have a Thor vs. Captain Marvel fight," Bradley said. "How do we get there?"
New episodes of What If...? air Wednesdays on Disney+.
Source: Deadline