This October, VisionQuest will premiere on Disney+ and conclude the trilogy that started with WandaVision and continued in Agatha All Along. The Avenger will seemingly be on a quest to regain his emotions after being rebuilt by S.W.O.R.D., and later having his memories restored by the Hex Vision (he's seen them, he just can't feel them).
As well as meeting his son, Tommy, Vision will reunite with his "father," Ultron. James Spader is set to reprise his Avengers: Age of Ultron role, both in android and human form. Now, a new rumour suggests this is setting something up for the future.
According to insider @MyTimeToShineH, Spader will return as Ultron after VisionQuest. There's no word on when or where that will happen, but rumours of The Blacklist actor being enlisted for multiple MCU projects first surfaced from a separate source last summer.
VisionQuest showrunner Terry Matalas previously promised that we'll see Ultron in all his robotic glory. "You do get to see robot Ultron, but you see a lot of James Spader and a lot of Paul Bettany together," he teased. "They are very much a core dynamic of the show."
He added that the show acts as "a delivery system for Bettany and Spade," and it's apparent that VisionQuest will finally address what happened after Vision and Ultron's final confrontation in the woods at the end of Avengers: Age of Ultron.
That was left deliberately ambiguous; while it seemed likely that Vision destroyed his "father," it's long been theorised that he might have let him go free (or that Ultron found a way to fake his death). Recently, Paul Bettany suggested that the Avenger has been storing these AIs in his own mind, so perhaps they escaped when he was destroyed in Avengers: Infinity War.
If so, Ultron is free to restore himself and menace any number of heroes. With Marvel Studios mulling over some sort of Vision/Star-Lord team-up based on previously leaked concept art, there's a chance he could go cosmic in an adaptation of Annihilation: Conquest.
We'll see, but Spader was phenomenal as Ultron the first time around, so the more we see of him, the better. After all, he's too good a villain to be a one-and-done, so VisionQuest will be a good start when it comes to putting him back in the spotlight.
The announced cast of VisionQuest features Paul Bettany as Vision, Ruaridh Mollica as Tommy Maximoff, James Spader as Ultron, T'Nia Miller as Jocasta, James D'Arcy as J.A.R.V.I.S., Orla Brady as F.R.I.D.A.Y., Emily Hampshire as E.D.I.T.H., Henry Lewis as D.U.M.-E (or Dum-E), Jonathan Sayer as U, Todd Stashwick as Paladin, and Faran Tahir as Raza.
VisionQuest is set to premiere on Disney+ on October 14.