What If…? Season 2 brought us a number of wacky possibilities for our favorite Marvel heroes, but one Spider-Man episode intended to go dark.
Ever since Marvel blew its multiverse wide open, the What If…? series has been capturing imagination of MCU fans by exploring multiple fun concepts through animation, such as “What if Nebula joined the Nova Corps?” and “What if the Avengers assembled in 1602?” all through the fourth-wall-breaking eyes of The Watcher, the series’ narrator.
With the Disney+ series now heading into Season 3 – read everything we know about that here – the creators of the show have now begun looking back at what’s just come out, and turns out there had been some scrapped ideas.
One idea includes a dark Spider-Man story, which would have possibly taken inspiration for a well known dystopian movie.
Spider-Man has multiple dark yet discarded What If…? storylines
In an interview with IGN, Season 1 and Season 2 showrunner A.C. Bradley explained how there was more creative freedom in making Season 2: “With Season 1, there was a push to use the headliners, to do the Tony Stark episode, to do the Black Panther episode and Doctor Strange.
“But with Season 2, we had a bit more freedom. At the end of the day, we’re not writing the big blockbuster, 100 million dollar movie. We’re not even show-running the live action TV shows. We’re the scrappy, little animation show slipping under the Marvel machine radar. So, it was really subconscious but I think we veered toward the scrappy characters in Season 2. We started with the second stringers, the undervalued and overlooked, like Nebula, Darcy, and Hela.”
But the big names in the MCU were still considered, including Spider-Man. In fact, as stated by Bradley, “I did write an episode, which is forever going in a drawer, that was very, very dark. I was calling it ‘Children of Men with Spider Man.'”
For those who don’t know, Children of Men is an acclaimed 2006 British dystopian film that follows this plot: “When infertility threatens mankind with extinction and the last child born has perished, a disillusioned bureaucrat becomes the unlikely champion in the fight for the survival of Earth’s population; He must face down his own demons and protect the planet’s last remaining hope from danger.”
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However, it seems that Bradley didn’t go down this route as a large part of the second season was written, developed, and voiced during the global lockdowns of 2020.
“It felt like the world was already ending and we didn’t need to add to it,” Bradley said. “And so it became kind of an escape and a fun release.”
While Bradley didn’t go into any more detail about the scrapped Spider-Man episode, it’s not hard to believe him. In fact, this isn’t the first time that a darker Spider-Man episode was passed on. In Season 1, one potential episode was going to include the web-slinger turning into an actual Spider.
In a 2021 interview, Bradley himself even mentioned this: “There was a an original What If run where Spider-Man turns into a real spider, and that was just too dark and too body horror for their PG-13 [rating].”
With the third season already being promoted, fans can only wonder what’s to come for What If…?, and if Spider-Man will finally get to go dark.
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Spider-Man 4 | Venom 3 | Deadpool 3 | X-Men ’97 | Captain America: Brave New World | She-Hulk Season 2 | Thor 5 | Fantastic Four | Avengers Secret Wars | Avengers The Kang Dynasty | Agatha Darkhold Diaries
