Elizabeth Olsen Says Marvel Didn’t Originally Have Long-Term Plans For Scarlet Witch

Elizabeth Olsen was first announced as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Wanda Maximoff in November 2013, so she’s been part of the family for a long time. However, up until the release of Disney Plus series WandaVision almost seven and a half years later, she’d never been more than a secondary character throughout her entire stint in the franchise.

After making a brief debut in the post-credits scene of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Olsen would go on to appear in Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, but her screen time was hardly substantial. In fact, even her relationship with Vision largely unfolded off screen, and more casual viewers weren’t given much reason to invest in the pair before this past January.

Thanks to WandaVision, though, Scarlet Witch has surged in popularity and Olsen now has to be regarded as a serious contender when it comes to this year’s small screen awards season, while Kevin Feige touted her as the most powerful hero in the MCU, which we’ll no doubt discover for ourselves when Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness arrives next March. That being said, the actress recently admitted that there weren’t any long-term plans originally in place for her character, leading to her renegotiating her contract several times as new projects kept coming her way.

“I signed on for two movies and a cameo.  I’ve gone through three rounds of contracts with Marvel already. I just do, like, appetizers or something, they never have me over for the big meal! People sign six-movie, nine-movie deals, I’ve heard. That’s a lot! And they didn’t really know how much further it was gonna go. We never knew if we were even gonna touch half the stuff we did in WandaVision.”

Scarlet Witch has gone from bit part player to one of the key driving forces behind the entirety of Phase Four, which is an impressive turnaround for a superhero that failed to make much of an impression during her first handful of movies, one who was largely used as a walking plot device to further the narrative and little else.