It’s a mad, mad multiverse as Marvel drops first trailer for What If…?

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  Jeffrey Wright voices Uatu the Watcher. [credit: YouTube/Marvel Studios ]

All our favorite MCU characters are back in animated form—plus a few more obscure players—in the first trailer for What If…?, a forthcoming series on Disney+ in which key events in the main timeline play out differently, “creating a multiverse of infinite possibilities.” It’s part of the MCU’s Phase Four, in which this multiverse will clearly play a pivotal role.

(Some spoilers for prior MCU films below.)

This new series is based on the What If…? comic book anthology series that debuted in 1977, narrated by a character called Uatu the Watcher, an entity from a computer world who travels throughout the cosmos observing the rise of fall of various civilizations. Each story in the comics centered on an event in the mainstream Marvel Universe, but then there would be a point of divergence, and the rest of the story explored the consequences of that change to the timeline. Marvel Studios first explored the What If…? concept in S4 of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., when the team members found themselves trapped in a virtual creation called the Framework, each living out a drastically different life.