Marvel is never afraid to get a little meta, especially with its original shows. In Hawkeye, a real Broadway composer wrote a big ensemble number depicting the Battle of New York, WandaVision was a TV series dedicated to the art of TV, and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law was basically just one long meta-joke, complete with Jennifer Walters climbing out of the Disney+ menu screen and confronting a robot Kevin Feige.
But in the next Marvel series, Wonder Man, the franchise takes on a brand-new meta-concept: poking fun at the sheer amount of projects it creates. Take a look at the teaser below:
Wonder Man stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Simon Williams, an actor cast in a superhero reboot, but this teaser happens before all that. Instead, it shows director Von Kovak discuss coming out of retirement to direct a new Wonder Man movie, and how the original (which we get a glimpse of) inspired him. If this director looks familiar to you, it’s because he is played by Zlato Burić, previously seen as Boravian leader Vasil Ghurkos in Superman.
We also see Williams reacting to this, as well as glimpses of the production of the movie itself, including the return of Ben Kingsley as Trevor Slattery, the actor who previously posed as The Mandarin in Wonder Man showrunner Destin Daniel Cretton’s previous Marvel project, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
“Everyone is tired of superheroes,” Kovak says in this shocking interview. “Why go see them in the cinema?” This is clearly poking fun at the idea of “superhero fatigue,” the term used to describe the dwindling demand for superhero movies after more than a decade of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other franchises. It looks like Wonder Man’s answer is to keep the movies fictional, and instead make a TV show unlike any we’ve seen before.
