Elizabeth Olsen Reveals Disney+'s Scarlet Witch TV Show Has An Unexpected Timeline

scarlet witch

It was last fall when we first heard that the upcoming streaming service Disney+ was planning on creating limited run television shows for some of the MCU's biggest characters. One of the first characters mentioned to be getting her own series was Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda Maximoff / Scarlet Witch, and when Disney publicly laid out plans for Disney+ a couple of weeks ago, we got confirmation that Olsen will be starring alongside Paul Bettany, who plays Vision in the MCU, for the show WandaVision.

While we were wondering what the story could be about, Olsen has now dropped some details that give us a bit of a clue. Here's what she had to say:

There’s quite a few other comic books that we’re pulling from and it’s going to be Wanda and the Vision, and I think at the Disney+ launch chat, they showed a photo of us in the ’50s.

I know what all you MCU fans are thinking. Wanda is still in her twenties, and Vision is, technically, even younger than that, since he wasn't created until the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron, which only came out in 2015. So, there's no way either of these folks should be bopping around the 1950s with the beatniks, unless there are some time-travel shenanigans involved, right?

Well, not exactly. Olsen noted in her talk with Variety that the show will be taking story ideas from a lot of different comics to get the story for Wanda and Vision, as many TV and films do when adapting comic characters who have frequently been having adventures on the page for several decades. What makes this interesting, is that by mentioning the 1950s, it alludes to WandaVision using a limited run of Vision comics, which released in 2017, for at least partial inspiration.

In writer Tom King's Vision series, we find Vision and Wanda's relationship, often fraught with difficulty from outside influences like hate groups because of the synthetic humanoid / human pairing, has fallen apart long ago. However, Vision is still determined to live a normal life and prove that he's as human as anyone else.

To that end, he creates a synthetic family for himself, a wife and two teenagers who can think independently of him even though he made them, and moves the family to the suburbs of Washington D.C. to start work as a defense analyst for the president.

While this story takes place in the modern day, the aesthetic of the artwork is very Normal Rockwell and totally fits with the idea of a 1950s image. Jac Schaeffer, a screenwriter for Captain Marvel, is acting as writer, producer, and showrunner on WandaVision. He could very easily be using the aesthetic and basic storyline of this run of Vision comics to get the bones of the story for the Disney+ series.

As you might imagine, just because Vision is trying to live his best human-like life in this story, that doesn't mean that everything goes even remotely well for him and his synthetic family. That Norman Rockwell quality is hiding a lot of deep and dangerous stuff. So you can rest assured that if WandaVision is using this story for the show, that it won't just be all ladies in gloves, men mowing the lawn in slacks and staid dinner parties with neighbors who actually don't like you that much.

Elizabeth Olsen also noted that WandaVision is due to start shooting this fall, which would put it on track to debut sometime during the second year of Disney+'s existence. The service will launch this year, on November 12, with monthly prices going for only $6.99 a month, and an option to buy a full year in advance for $69.99.

There will certainly be more news coming about WandaVision, so be sure to stay tuned to CinemaBlend for all the latest info!

Adrienne Jones
Senior Content Creator

Covering The Witcher, Outlander, Virgin River, Sweet Magnolias and a slew of other streaming shows, Adrienne Jones is a Senior Content Producer at CinemaBlend, and started in the fall of 2015. In addition to writing and editing stories on a variety of different topics, she also spends her work days trying to find new ways to write about the many romantic entanglements that fictional characters find themselves in on TV shows. She graduated from Mizzou with a degree in Photojournalism.