What to know about Marvel’s What If…?, coming to Disney Plus

The Marvel characters you met on the big screen and Disney Plus get a bit of a makeover in Marvel Studios’ first MCU animated series: What if …?

As Marvel progresses into Phase 4 with series and movies like Loki and Black Widow, what if …? is leading the MCU in new directions on several fronts.

Check out everything we have about What if … below? know that’s coming to Disney Plus later this summer.

warning: This post provides important details about the plot of Avengers: Endgame, Loki, and other MCU films and series.

Why is?

The aptly titled What if …? asks and plays a series of what-ifs, all related to familiar MCU stories.

What if Peggy Carter had been selected instead of Steve Rogers for the Super Soldier Initiative that is rewriting Captain America’s history?

What if Yondu hadn’t kidnapped Peter Quill in Missouri? Would a lot change if he and his gang of Ravagers instead kidnapped a young T’Challa in Wakanda and rewrote both Black Panther and Guardians of the Galaxy?

These and other hypotheses can be found in What If …? to be examined. outside the main continuity of other MCU titles.

When and where can you see it?

The first season will consist of 10 episodes.

It premieres on August 11th and will be broadcast weekly thereafter.

Has anyone added a what if …? Alarm on your calendar will likely notice that August 11th is Wednesday. This means that What If …?, Like Loki before, will not be released on Fridays like WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Instead, new episodes will be streamed on the streamer every Wednesday at 12 p.m. PST.

See also: The best Marvel series and films on Disney Plus

The main actors

With many characters known to MCU fans, What If…? features the voices of multiple actors repeating their roles, along with a host of new characters and voice actors.

Perhaps the most notable voice actor in What if …? is the late, great Chadwick Boseman.

Boseman has been part of the MCU since 2016 as the iconic T’Challa / Black Panther, first appearing in Captain America: Civil War before his own stand-alone film Black Panther, along with two other roles as the Wakanda King in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

Boseman died last year at the young age of 43 after suffering from cancer for years. For his final live action performance in Ma Rainy’s Black Bottom and What If…? he was nominated for an Oscar. will be his last known acting loan.

Lending out other MCU legs What if …? These include Hayley Atwell, Michael B. Jordan, Sebastian Stan, Josh Brolin, Mark Ruffalo, Samuel L. Jackson, Chris Hemsworth, Karen Gillen, Jeremy Renner, Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, Neal McDonough, Dominic Cooper, Sean Gunn, Natalie Portman , David Dastmalchian, Stanley Tucci, Taika Waititi, Toby Jones, Djimon Hounsou, Jeff Goldblum, Michael Rooker, Chris Sullivan, Frank Grillo, Seth Green and Andy Serkis.

We don’t know if all of these actors are providing new dialogue or performing through archive footage like in Loki, but it’s a pretty large recurring cast.

The biggest known addition is Jeffrey Wright. The actor from Basquiat, Westworld and Casino Royale narrates and delivers the voice of the guardian.

If you’re familiar with Marvel, it’s probably wise to expect some surprising guest voices alongside those currently confirmed.

Bryan Andrews directed all 10 episodes with AC Bradley as chief writer.

The series is produced in-house at Marvel Studios, with executive producers Kevin Feige, Brad Winderbaum, Bryan Andrews and AC Bradley.

How does what if …? fit in the MCU?

Marvel has been making animated films and series for decades, but what if …? is the first part of the company’s Marvel Cinematic Universe.

That means the characters on screen look and sound familiar to those who have appeared in films like The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, and Black Panther.

You will, however, deviate from these films very intentionally. You can expect them to play with the expectations already set in the rest of the MCU as different versions of familiar stories unfold.

What if…? is the fourth MCU series to air on Disney Plus. This is followed by WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Loki.

Other upcoming MCU series include Hawkeye and Ms. Marvel, which will go to streamer in late 2021. Series in earlier stages of preproduction include Armor Wars, Secret Invasion, Moon Knight, She-Hulk, Ironheart, and a show in Black Panther’s Wakandaak.

It is still unknown how direct What if …? will build on these series, existing MCU films or upcoming projects.

The multiverse of everything

In the trailer for What if …? we hear the Guardian inviting us to “enter the multiverse”. That means that, strictly speaking, we don’t just see self-contained hypothetical scenarios. We see versions of events that actually happened, just not necessarily in the universes we have seen so far.

If you’ve seen Avengers: Endgame, Spider-Man: Far From Home, or Loki, you probably already know where this is going.

Reality as we (or MCU characters) know it is protected by the Time Variance Authority (TVA). There is a multiverse of different timelines that allows for forks in the timeline (sometimes via time travel), but the TVA intervenes when things get too out of hand and cause “nexus events” that are too far from a “sacred” “Timeline would differ.”

When the sacred timeline is freed from TVA, branching timelines can develop freely.

Loki’s season 1 has finally freed the sacred timeline. This means that branching timelines can now develop unchecked (or “unabridged” in the language of the TVA). In short, a certain order could previously be maintained from one timeline to another within the multiverse, with all timelines moving more or less in unison.

That has changed. A bifurcating timeline could potentially cause Thanos to wipe out half of all life in the universe. Or could Tony see Stark die in the cave where he was supposed to become Iron Man. That would probably have been nexus events in the past that fundamentally changed the timeline.

We don’t yet know the exact nature of the multiverse, and it sounds like Marvel creatives are sorting it out too.

After the Loki Finale on July 14th, Kevin Feige, President of Marvel Studios, spoke on the podcast D23: Inside Disney. He had just had a meeting with his Marvel Studios team to “set the rules of the multiverse and how to really implement the excitement surrounding the multiverse.”

What do we do now?

Marvel likes to pretty much tie things together, and it stands to reason that What If …?, Even as an animated series, will have an impact on the broader MCU.

So far, the MCU Disney Plus series has blasted points for later films. WandaVision and Loki build Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. The Falcon and Winter Soldier are likely to be part of a new Captain America franchise – while also introducing Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who has already appeared in Black Widow.

What if…? has plenty of room to stay in check. But it also takes place in the multiverse. As characters like Wanda, Loki and Doctor Strange start jumping into different timelines across the multiverse, we may become characters in scenarios from What If …? Bleeding into other MCU properties.

Could the horror elements of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness be linked to zombies spotted in What If …? Follower? Will Loki’s mishaps in What If …? affect him in season 2 of Loki?

We won’t get answers to these questions yet, but the premise of What if …? leaves a lot of space to imagine future crossovers.

What if…? Theories, rumors and Easter eggs

Disney doesn’t have too many plot details on What If …? shared, but we can put some comprehensive narratives together from pieces that are in trailers and official What if …? Art.

These little things include:

• Tony Stark meets Black Panthers Erik Killmonger in the desert, where he became Iron Man in 2008
• The Guardians of the Galaxy take the place of the Avengers in the Battle of New York
• T’Challa replaces Peter Quill as Star-Lord under the Guardians of the Galaxy
• Howard the Duck appears in a way
• Peggy Carter adopts a British version of the Captain America coat as Captain Carter (and possibly Marvel Comics’ Captain Britain)
• The presence of one of the Guardians, cosmic beings with almost limitless power in Marvel Comics
• Captain America, Iron Man and Hawkeye appear as zombies
• Spider-Man acquires the magical cloak from Doctor Strange and may replace Strange as the Sorcerer Supreme

We know that about what if …? until now.

In addition, we must all tune in on August 11th to find out more.