Disney suddenly has a lot of big plans for its Disney+ streaming service, with the initial idea of taking things slow recently replaced by a new approach that involves dumping the “entire” Disney vault online—in addition to big-name projects that have already been announced, like The Mandalorian and the Marvel Cinematic Universe spin-off shows. Now, since Disney is already committed to shoveling a bunch of money into the engines that drive Disney+, it might as well pick up a whole new Marvel show from MCU mastermind Kevin Feige.
That’s what /Film says is happening at least, but there’s a shocking twist here: The series will supposedly be based on Marvel’s What If series, which originally ran from 1977 to 1984 but tends to pop up every few years when there’s a lull in major crossover events. /Film’s story hasn’t been met with an official announcement from Marvel or Disney, so we don’t know if this is really going to get made, but the report says What If will be an animated series that explores what would happen if various major events in the MCU had unfolded differently. It even says that Disney could “potentially” bring in some of the actors from the MCU to reprise their roles, since you don’t have to work out nearly as much to provide the voice of Captain America as you do to fit into the Captain America suit
The What If line in the comics ranges from direct alternate endings like “What if Iron Man lost the Civil War?” to more general concepts like “What if someone else had been bitten by the radioactive spider?,” and /Film specifically mentions that this animated series would do an episode based on the What If issue where Loki wields the mystical hammer Mjolnir instead of Thor—which is something we’ve already had a glimpse of, in a way. We don’t have any other specifics, and none of this has been confirmed anyway, but there are loads of different stories Disney+ could tell with an anthology like this just be twisting the major events of every MCU movie. “What if Jeff Bridges killed Tony Stark?,” “What if Steve Rogers hadn’t been given the super soldier serum?,” “What if Thor’s eyebrows hadn’t been dyed?,” “What if Age Of Ultron had been good?,” “What if Marvel hadn’t waited over a decade to do a female-led movie?,” and other stuff like that.
Also, for the record, the all-time best issue of What If was the one where Captain America was stuck in the ice into the ‘80s, allowing an impostor Cap to get swayed by right-wing politicians and secret villains who use him to turn America into a fascist state. It’s all very “make America great again,” until the real Cap shows up, makes a powerful speech about what actually makes America great (freedom, basically), and then he, an alternate version of The Falcon, and a gun-toting Antifa Spider-Man join together to sing “America The Beautiful.” It’s a masterpiece.