Cookie cutter heroes are largely a thing of the past, with modern audiences wanting a little more to chew on in their protagonists than a simple good guy who usually does the right thing, no questions asked. As the most successful franchise in history, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is always going to be driven by characters with good intentions, but shades of grey and some depth never hurt anyone.
Captain America is about as clean cut as they come, but he was still a man out of time pining for the love of his life and constantly feeling undermined by superiors he was increasingly distrustful of. Tony Stark, meanwhile, went out of his way to keep trying to protect the world but always somehow found a way to make things worse, while Thor has seen his parents, brother, friends and entire homeworld wiped out.
However, nobody in the MCU comes close to matching the tragic history of Wanda Maximoff. Orphaned as a child and experimented on by HYDRA, she made the wrong choice in siding with Ultron and lost her brother as a result, while she was powerless to stop Thanos from murdering Vision right in front of her eyes.
WandaVision director Matt Shankman admitted in a recent interview that her suffering plays an integral role in the narrative of the Disney Plus series, but given the sitcom influence, it isn’t exactly going to be a relentlessly downbeat examination of her psyche.
“Wanda is probably the person who has suffered the most of anyone in the MCU. And so the show is always grounded in that. Even though what you see are faithfully recreated television shows, there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye.”
Of course, Kevin Feige has already revealed that Wanda is the most powerful superhero in the MCU, which looks to be bad news for those around her, given that WandaVision directly informs the events of Spider-Man 3 and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, two potential game-changers that deal with the very idea of reality itself.