CHAOS THEORY

What if Peggy Carter took the Super Soldier Serum instead of Steve Rogers? What if T’Challa became Star-Lord? What if... zombies? If you’ve got at least one other superhero fan in your life, the chances are you’ve already had some of the same late-night, long-drive conversations that went on behind the scenes of What If...?, Marvel Studios’ latest foray into animation and one of the most ambitious new deep cuts in the MCU – an all-star anthology series that deliberately messes up the multiverse just for the fun of it.

“I remember when we were first talking about doing Avengers Assemble,” Marvel’s vice-president of production and development, Brad Winderbaum, tells Total Film. “I heard Kevin [] talk about the strange alchemy of mashing characters together that don’t seem to belong in the same story – this idea of asking how those personality types interact, and how they challenge each other and force each other to grow. One night I just started texting Kevin after a drive home and we just started going back and forth about By the next day, we were talking about these bespoke individual character studies, these episodes that take a story you know and tweak one little detail to watch the ripple effect.”