What If…? blows up a very nerdy bit of Marvel movie trivia
The most bizarre thing about this week’s What if …? comic is its technical basis on Marvel’s The Avengers Prelude to Fury’s Big Week. This comic quickly gained a place in the Marvel movie fan’s lexicon by highlighting a simple fact: Nick Fury can be very busy.
It was precisely that comic that A.C. Bradley, the series creator, wanted to give a What If style spin in the third episode.
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Before Disney Plus was even an idea in a Disney executive’s eyes, Marvel Entertainment had other plans for cross-media connections to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was planning a TV show that followed the agents of SHIELD and tie-in comics.
With art by Luke Ross, Daniel HDR and Wellinton Alves, Fury’s Big Week was written by Christopher Yost, Eric Pearson, who would help write Thor: The Dark World and Thor: Ragnarok.
One week later, Agent Coulson and Nick Fury hopped the globe with Captain America, finding a strangely heavy hammer in New Mexico and giving Tony Stark all the tools he needed to cure his palladium poisoning. All this while Bruce Banner and The Abomination were wrecking Harlem.
Bradley said to Polygon that she knew from the beginning that she wanted to play with Fury’s Big Week. “Originally, it was going to almost be a French farce where everything just keeps falling apart.” However, the idea developed when Bradley focused on Nick Fury and discovered a new side to the unflappable SHIELD director.
Bradley spoke out about her thinking process, saying that Nick Fury is having a crisis and wondering if he is making the right decisions. How can we make the Avengers Initiative fail if it is going to fail? Before they can rise, we start to kill off all the Avengers. After that, it was just a matter of finding our favourite scenes from those movies and devising ways to twist them.
This is how “What If…?” was born. “The World Lost Its Mightiest Heroes?” was almost a backwards concept. The creative team decided on an outcome before figuring out the simple change to the Marvel movie timeline that would lead to such a crisis. To figure out what had happened, the ultimate villain of the episode was to find out who could kill the Avengers, Loki, Ultron and Thanos.
Bradley explained to Polygon that there wasn’t a “What if?” yet. “So, the ‘What If?’ is What if Hope Van Dyne becomes a SHIELD agent? That could be an entire episode in itself. Then there is also the notion that Hope Van Dyne becomes a SHIELD agent after Fury convinces and dies. This makes perfect sense to Hank Pym. He would not have been able to reconnect with his daughter at this stage in the timeline. After the death of his wife, the loss of his daughter would have driven him to the edge. It all worked out in a very nice way. Although it was a difficult puzzle, the final result was well worth the effort.
