This past Christmas, Marvel Studios released the second season of its animated series, “What If?” on Disney+ around the world. This series flips the script on the MCU, reimagining famous events from the films in unexpected ways. Marvel Studios’ first animated series focuses on different heroes from the MCU, featuring a voice cast that includes a host of stars who reprise their roles.

Throughout the two seasons, we’ve seen many different characters from the live-action films explored, including Iron Man, Ant-Man, Spider-Man and many more.

However, the creators of the show did have some limits set by Marvel Studios on what they could and couldn’t do. During a recent interview with the “What If…?” executive producers A.C. Bradley and Bryan Andrews on the Phase Zero Podcast, they revealed some of the limits.

They were asked if they were allowed to use characters that had been used in the MCU yet, like Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Ghost Rider?, to which Bryan Andrews replied:

“They’re pretty much off the table. Yeah, they were like, ‘No… we gotta do it first in live-action and then you get to do it.’ And we were like, ‘Aw man.’ ‘Cause we would’ve loved to play with all kinds of toys, but there’s limitations.”

It does make sense for the debut of many of the most popular Marvel characters that haven’t yet been explored on the big screen by Marvel Studios that they want to do it right in order to have as big an impact as possible.

However, they were given The Watcher as a brand new character to explore, which would have been necessary for this series to work with a guide through the multiverse.

A.C. Bradley went on to explain some of the issues that they had while creating “What If?” such as with Sam Wilson’s Captain America (who will be appearing in the third season) due to filming on the Disney+ series.

“It’s also why we couldn’t do Sam Wilson’s Captain America, because we didn’t know when that would be coming out. We were writing Season 2, Falcon and the Winter Soldier was shooting, paused shooting, the scripts were being re-written, because of other things, and we were like, ’Well, we don’t know when anything’s airing, so we couldn’t touch it, because we’re not allowed to… It makes sense. Let the character live in live-action first and then come play in the Multiverse.”

This is also likely to be the case for other characters like the X-Men and Fantastic Four, which have appeared in “Doctor Strange And The Multiverse Of Madness”, “The Marvels” and the upcoming “Deadpool 3” film since an animated series takes many years to create.

While we wait for the upcoming third season of “What If?”, you can watch the first two seasons of the show on Disney+ now.

Are you excited for the third season of “What If?” Let us know on social media!

Roger Palmer

Roger has been a Disney fan since he was a kid and this interest has grown over the years. He has visited Disney Parks around the globe and has a vast collection of Disney movies and collectibles. He is the owner of What's On Disney Plus & DisKingdom. Email: Roger@WhatsOnDisneyPlus.com Twitter: Twitter.com/RogPalmerUK Facebook: Facebook.com/rogpalmeruk

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