Wonder Man Season 2 Is Canceled, Despite Already Being Announced
A one-hit wonder.
When Kevin Feige took the stage at San Diego Comic-Con last weekend, he warned the crowd that Marvel’s much-anticipated Hall H presentation would be focused “mostly on movies.” Mostly turned out to be entirely. There was no discussion of Disney+ series at all, which was especially strange given that there’s a series, Vision Quest, scheduled for release later this year.
Now, we do have a belated update about the MCU’s TV side... but it’s not a development any fan wants to hear.
According to Variety, Wonder Man Season 2 is no longer moving forward at Disney+. The show was a critical success for Disney+, and star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II even scored an Emmy nomination, something that hasn’t happened for an MCU role since WandaVision back in 2021.
The double act of Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley) unfortunately won’t return to Disney+.
According to the report, the writers’ room for the season was never opened, so the project wasn’t far into pre-production. No specific reason for the move was cited, but this announcement does come not long after Wonder Man creator Destin Daniel Cretton was announced as the director of the upcoming Naruto movie. Maybe viewership wasn’t what Disney had hoped, and Cretton had seen the writing on the wall, or maybe this wasn’t a matter of Marvel execs changing their minds but rather Cretton freeing up his schedule.
Regardless of why it happened, walking back a renewal is an unusual practice and a big deal for the MCU. Second seasons are very rare for Marvel television: of the live-action MCU shows, only Loki and Daredevil: Born Again have had multiple seasons.
Destin Daniel Cretton, the creator of Wonder Man, is now directing a Naruto movie.
Wonder Man only lasting one season wouldn’t have been a shock in isolation, but being renewed and then having that renewal abruptly reversed is a drastic choice. In recent years, however, Kevin Feige has suggested rolling back the scope of the MCU to only one or two projects a year, and this move does align with that strategy.
More optimistically, there’s always a chance that we’ll see Simon Williams in a future MCU movie. It’s not unprecedented: the previously-announced Nova series is now being reworked as a movie, so maybe Wonder Man could get a similar treatment. And even if he doesn’t get his own movie, this is the MCU: any hero could appear at any time. Who knew that, when Iron Man 3 hit theaters over a decade ago, its villain would end up the co-star of a Marvel buddy comedy about Hollywood?
