Empire’s WandaVision Cover Revealed
Empire Online, the movie magazine’s digital destination, revealed the WandaVision cover on Friday for Empire Magazine‘s January 2021 issue, on sale Thursday, November 26. Marvel’s most enigmatic couple, the Vision and the Scarlet Witch, are featured on the cover. The magazine will also feature exclusive images of the upcoming series and interviews with Marvel Studios’ boss Kevin Feige, director Matt Shakman, Paul Bettany, and Elizabeth Olsen.
WandaVision Cover Breaks from Reality
Empire Magazine often releases more than one edition of its covers — the newsstand cover and the subscriber-exclusive cover — and the same is true for the upcoming WandaVision cover.
For the newsstand edition of the cover, it features the Vision (Paul Bettany) and the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) moving through their last known reality as members of the Avengers to an alternate reality of a 1970s sitcom.
Photo: Marvel/Empire Magazine
German illustrator Max Löffler designed the exclusive subscriber cover; you can look at other art by the illustrator here.
The cover features a futuristic vision of The Vision himself, with Wanda’s silhouette holding the mind stone’s weight. And, after reading the illustrators biography, the image also draws on some narrative similarities in the imagery of a famous series by Stephen King and the history of the Vision and the Scarlet Witch.
Photo: Entertainment Weekly
From the nimble fingers of a reporter on Marvel’s Pulse beat team for WandaVision, the cover of the issue tells fans more about the show than meets the Eye of Agamotto:
[WandaVision sets] the tone of big things to come, Wanda and Vision tear through reality on the exclusive trippy cover of Empire’s January 2021 issue — Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen pose and smile as both their human and hero selves at once, as two people unravelling reality as we know it.
WandaVision is the most ambitious Marvel TV project to date. It is also the first content released in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in over a year because of the coronavirus pandemic. Hopefully, this means the show will mark the beginning of a beautiful friendship between Disney+ and Marvel.
“I Can’t Control Their Fear, Only My Own.”
Photo: Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney
The Empire Online article — and Marvel’s 616 content — gives me hope that fans can continue to see the MCU diversify its cast of characters. The article by Ella Kemp began with a Star Trek-like flourish:
It’s a brand new era: Marvel are expanding beyond their cinematic universe, as WandaVision, marks the comic book titans’ bold new era on the small screen.
I hope WandaVision is the beginning of a new era at Marvel: To boldly go where no one has gone before. In the words of the Scarlet Witch herself, there are worlds outside this one to explore, meaning there is a diverse cast of characters in the Marvel Vault. And the cinematic universe can continue to introduce more representation on screen.
Photo: Marvel
WandaVision Cover Reveals More Sitcom t-Ropes
Empire teases an interview with the WandaVision director about an “on-set sitcom bootcamp.” I definitely want to know more about Shakman’s preparations. So far, from Entertainment Weekly’s exclusive interviews with Shakman and Feige, we learned that the pair consulted with sitcom legend Dick Van Dyke about making a classic broadcast sitcom.
Photo: Marvel
In 2019, Shakman and Feige invited the actor to Disneyland for a lunch meeting, probably at the renowned Club 33 (where they would have been served by some of Disneyland’s top-tier cast members). At this lunch, the creative team picked the comedy legend’s brain about all things sitcom. And in this interview, we learned a little about the research that went into crafting a sitcom bootcamp.
Shakman told Entertainment Weekly:
[The Dick Van Dyke Show] can be very broad with silly physical-comedy gags, and yet it never feels false, and I wondered how they did that. His answer was really simple: He basically said that if it couldn’t happen in real life, it couldn’t happen on the show.
That quote, and everything else I’ve read, makes me want to know more about the craftsmanship behind the making of the show. I love Disney Gallery: Star Wars: The Mandalorian. Hopefully, we will get similar behind-the-scenes documentaries for each of the Disney+ MCU shows, and Disney Gallery: WandaVision would be a great place to begin.
Photo: Just Jared
What does this tell fans about the forthcoming WandaVision series on Disney+? True Believers, what do you hope it means for the mini-series?
