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Head writer (s) Anna Drezen (until episode 9), Colin Jost, Michael Che, Kent Sublette, Alison Gates and Streeter Seidell (since episode 10) [32] Writing staff. Rosebud Baker (since episode 13) Dan Bulla. Megan Callahan-Shah (Weekend Update) Steven Castillo (until episode 9) Mike DiCenzo. Billy Domineau.
A head writer is a person who oversees the team of writers on a television or radio series. The title is common in the soap opera genre, as well as with sketch comedies and talk shows that feature monologues and comedy skits.
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The episodes are approximately 30 minutes in length. A. C. Bradley and Bryan Andrews return as head writer and lead director, respectively, with Andrews directing the majority of episodes and Stephan Franck, the first season's head of animation, directing the first episode.
- An exclusive sitdown with one of the key minds behind What If...? Season 2.
- "What If... Nebula Joined the Nova Corps?"
- "What If... Peter Quill Attacked Earth's Mightiest Heroes?"
- "What If... Happy Hogan Saved Christmas?"
- "What If... Iron Man Crashed Into the Grandmaster?"
- "What If... Captain Carter Fought the Hydra Stomper?"
- "What If... Kahhori Reshaped the World?"
- "What If... Hela Found the Ten Rings?"
- "What If... the Avengers Assembled in 1602?"
- "What If... Strange Supreme Intervened?"
By Tara Bennett
Updated: Dec 31, 2023 4:05 pm
Posted: Dec 31, 2023 3:59 pm
Warning: The below article contains full spoilers for What If…? Season 2.
The December 30 drop of "What If... Strange Supreme Intervened?" marks the end of the nine-day event release of Marvel Studios What If...? Season 2. The daily release schedule was a first for the studio and Disney+ streamer, which gave audiences a last run of MCU stories for 2023.
Covering everything from period pieces to introducing the origin story of Kahhori (Devery Jacobs), an original indigenous superhero, What If...? Season 2 had plenty to offer, especially for those who have a soft spot for the underdogs of the MCU. To get some insight about how the sophomore season was constructed and any “what ifs” that didn’t make it into the final episode count, IGN got on the phone with Season 1 and Season 2 head writer/showrunner, A.C. Bradley (Trollhunters: Tales of Arcadia, Ms. Marvel), to get some exclusive stories about the making of the season.
Writer: Matthew Chauncey
A Blade Runner-inspired noir episode, Bradley says the idea for the episode was born from the room’s love of Nebula actress Karen Gillan. “That episode came from Karen being the most talented and brilliant actress around,” Bradley says. “In Season 1, she came to play. And so going into Season 2, we definitely wanted to do an episode with her.”
Writer: Matthew Chauncey
“This was one of the episodes, and the loglines, I was given to pitch on the show to get the job,” Bradley reveals. She remembers being given a brief from Marvel Studios about them wanting to do an ‘80s version of the Avengers.
“The idea that Kevin [Feige] and the team already had was: Peter Quill comes to Earth and what happens next?” Bradley explains. “My take to get the job was that they needed to make it about Hope van Dyne. I said, ‘you already have the world and the heroes, what you don't have is the heart. You make it about two kids who just lost their mothers pretty much at the same time, which is all canon.’ ”
This pitch, amongst others, earned her the job but it ultimately didn’t make it into the Season 1 selections. “It was an idea that we loved from Season 1 that we got to revitalize in Season 2. Then Matt did the lineup. And I will say, he's admitted it publicly, that it was his idea to add Annette Bening's [Mar-Vell] because of his love of The American President,” she laughs.
And I said, 'Poor on the sugar! We'll have earned it by this point.'
“
Writers: A. C. Bradley & Matthew Chauncey
“That was the episode that we were writing when the world shut down,” Bradley says, referring to pandemic lockdowns. “Actually, our last day in the office was [Matt and I] watching the Quentin Tarantino episodes, ‘The Box" (Parts I and II),’ of Alias. We had it on because we just both love Alias so much and it's kind of their dark Die Hard episode. So we were watching that as we were breaking the show, and that was literally our last time together.”
Bradley says because of that turmoil, they decided to write it together as an escapism exercise. They also had a mandate, direct from Jon Favreau, to write an episode where he could voice the comics character The Freak.
"He had a moment where he went, ‘Wait a minute, am I Hans Gruber?’
“
“He read the two episodes that he would be appearing in Season 1 and he called up and said, ‘I'll do the show. But here's the deal. I want to headline Season 2, and I want to be The Freak.’ And we're like, 'Okay! Let's figure this out,’ ” Bradley remembers.
Writer: A. C. Bradley
Also known as the “lost episode” of Season 1, this script was moved to Season 2 due to production delays. Bradley says the idea was born from their very early brainstorming discussions about having The Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum) be the villain of the second season.
“It was going to be ‘what if The Grandmaster got the Infinity Gauntlet?’ “ Bradley reveals. “But at that point, we were knee deep in the animation and we’d closed animatics for Season 1. Plus, this idea of bringing back Strange Supreme kept bubbling up, especially after we decided to do a Captain Carter arc.”
Instead, The Grandmaster was adjusted to be the bane of Tony Stark’s (Mick Wingert) existence after the wormhole keeps him from returning home post Chitauri victory. Meant to be a “The Odyssey” homage, the episode then bloomed into an action-centric mash-up of Death Race and Mad Max: Fury Road. “[Executive producer] Brad Winderbaum took [the pitch] to the Marvel Parliament and they suggested instead of the gladiator games, that it's some other kind of game. And I was like, ‘We'll do race cars!’ ”
Writer: A. C. Bradley
This episode is a payoff to the Season 1 finale mid-credits cliffhanger where Captain Carter (Hayley Atwell) and Natasha Romanoff (Lake Bell) discover the Hydra Stomper on a cargo vessel. Having loved crafting the friendship between the two women in the first season, Bradley says this expanded adventure for the pair came out of a work trip to France.
“I was on the train to visit our animation studio to see early stuff for Season 1 and I just kept thinking, what would the world be like if a woman ended WWII?” she explains. “What if we all grew up with a female hero, and not just like a female Superman, but if the real hero of our world was a woman? The Feminist Revolution would have happened two or three decades earlier. Plus, getting to show two strong women who have each other's back. Their relationship isn't fraught with anxiety or worry or anything. It's actually just based on fun and enjoying each other's company.”
I just kept thinking, what would the world be like if a woman ended WWII?
“
Their rapport in fact set up a perfect foil with the reveal of Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weisz) as the orchestrator of an elaborate trap to lure the women to the Red Room. “The Red Room aspect actually came from Matt and I when we were in a small writers room that they had put together for Black Widow right before they started filming.”
Writer: Ryan Little
This episode marks the first time a What If…? series episode has introduced an original character into the MCU with Kahhori. But that wasn’t the initial goal when they first started breaking this episode.
“Even in the first days of Season 1, there were conversations about doing an episode that wasn't anchored around a character, but an MCU artifact,” Bradley reveals. “There were conversations of doing like a The Red Violin episode seeing the Tesseract history over 2000 years. Then for Season 2, we talked about what if the Vibranium meteor landed somewhere else? And so we combined those two ideas.”
Bradley says separately they talked about doing an indigenous story. In developing the idea, they decided to set it in North America so they wouldn’t step on the toes of Namor’s reveal in Wakanda Forever. Then they further drilled down on specifics based on their east coast origins.
“Ryan is from Pennsylvania and I'm from New York, which is a big part of Mohawk Territory,” Bradley says. “We actually grew up learning bits of their history during field trips. Then Ryan, during Christmas 2019, did some very rudimentary research back home in Pennsylvania and he came in and pitched the notion of The Sky World, the Fountain of youth and the Tesseract.”
"The last thing you want to do is repeat — however well-intentioned — mistakes of the past.
Writer: Matthew Chauncey
Actress Cate Blanchett returns to give Hela her own story and a redemption arc next to fellow villain, Xu Wenwu (Feodor Chin). Bradley says this episode's idea was always about finding a story for Hela.
“When I was writing the Season 1 Party Thor episode [‘What If... Thor Were an Only Child?’], Hela’ name came up a few times, like ‘is there a way to put Hela in here?’ “ Bradley remembers. “Matt and I had both recently rewatched Thor: Ragnarok, which we love. However, our girl got done dirty,” she laughs. “We couldn’t get her in Party Thor because she doesn't belong in that world, so let's do a redemption story. It was pretty much a very quick thing of exploring what if she was banished, instead of banished to hell?”
"Matt and I had both recently rewatched Thor: Ragnarok, which we love. However, our girl got done dirty.
“
Bradley continues, “At the same time, we were starting to read the Shang-Chi script which was about to go into production but had been paused because of the pandemic. I gotta give a shout out to [Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings writer] Dave Callaham because his script was just so much fun and so brilliant. Now because the movie had actually been paused in production, we realized we had to set this in the past and we can't use the actual Shang-Chi. From there, you start playing around with the story and the visuals of getting to see this time period in China you don't often get to see.”
Writers: A. C. Bradley & Ryan Little
Many Marvel comics readers will know the Neil Gaiman 1602 story arc from 2003, but this episode is more of a riff than an adaptation. “1602 became a game of me and Ryan brainstorming fun things we wanted to write,” Bradley explains. “One of my hobbies is adapting Shakespeare, so part of the impetus for this episode was to see if I could get Tom Hiddleston to do his famous Hamlet soliloquy and he did!” she laughs.
“Then, weirdly enough, me and Ryan are both big fans of the original Robin Hood story,” she continues. “We both studied it in college, so this is us wanting to take the Robin Hood myths and play with them. It’s a loose adaptation of [the comic] 1602 because we would never be able to do the whole story in one episode, and the original does go more into the history, where we do not.”
“1602 became a game of me and Ryan brainstorming fun things we wanted to write.
“
It’s also the continuation of the Captain Carter cliffhanger that closed the “Hydra Stomper” episode. “I just love this friendship between Peggy and The Watcher (Jeffrey Wright),” Bradley explains. “He sees her as a friend. She's the one human that he has formed a bond with, because she never backs down from him. She's able to see the bigger picture — not quite as big as he's able to see — but she does. And she always tries to do the right thing and will intervene in places that he can't.”
Writers: A. C. Bradley, Matthew Chauncey, and Ryan Little
For Part 2 of the season finale, Bradley says it was an all hands-on deck collaboration with Matt and Ryan writing the first draft when she was in Atlanta producing Ms. Marvel.
“When we were talking about bringing back Peggy, there was also about Strange Supreme and where would his story go?” Bradley details. “I was very adamant that we wouldn’t redeem him because he's made his choices. And he's a tragic character; the Shakespearean definition of tragedy is that they never learn to make a different choice. They repeat the same mistake over and over again, which is what I wanted for Strange Supreme.”
That stands in juxtaposition with Captain Carter, who will always make a choice that she thinks is for the greater good. “She'll always make the choice, even if it's at her own expense, which is why she's the hero,” Bradley says. “And why she is the one who had to go up against Strange Supreme.”
“I was very adamant that we wouldn’t redeem him because he's made his choices.
“
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