Marvel Studios has long had a unique approach to producing movies, whether it's starting shooting without a finished script or completely reshaping a story during reshoots.
However, stretched thin by former Disney CEO Bob Chapek, it became clear that this approach wouldn't work with TV shows. Marvel initially thought it could make a series just like its movies, only to eventually realise that the traditional showrunner model exists for a reason.
In the case of 2021's Hawkeye, it turns out the series underwent a major creative overhaul, right as it was supposed to begin shooting in New York.
Talking on The Watch podcast (via The Playlist), writer Andrew Guest revealed that Avengers: Doomsday co-director Joe Russo, whom he'd worked with on Community, got on the phone to him to ask if he could lend a helping hand on Clint Barton and Kate Bishop's team-up.
"[Trinh Tran] calls me three minutes later," Guest explained. "She says, 'I’m going to send you six one-hour episodes. I want to meet tomorrow to talk about it. We start shooting in New York in a week and a half, and we want to rewrite the whole thing.'"
"I came in towards the end. I mean, they had had a writer’s room. They had rewritten [the show] after that writer’s room a couple of times. I was literally the last call they could make to anybody. They want to make sure they shoot something and that they actually make it. And then I think there is this belief that we can 'Fix it as we go.' And that was very much the case with 'Hawkeye.'"
He continued, "You know, Hailee Steinfeld’s character was written too young. The dynamic between her and Jeremy [Renner] wasn’t there. There was a lot of extra twists and turns that were sort of gumming up the works. I needed their help as much as they needed mine. And we got through that process."
Guest impressed Marvel enough to be enlisted as Wonder Man's Head Writer. Work on the series was halted during 2023's WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, right as the studio realised it needed to move on from its old way of making TV shows (leading to Daredevil: Born Again's creative overhaul halfway through production).
Reflecting on the Wonder Man's uncertain fate, Guest said, "Even when we tested the first two episodes, which we did in front of an audience, and it didn’t test all that great because a lot of people were confused by the show."
"I was like, 'Okay, now they’re going to say, 'Let’s change it.'' And they said, 'No, we have to market this differently.' So what’s amazing to me about this is the enthusiasm is one thing, but the realities of the period in which you were making the show were another."
"We, by the grace of somebody, story gods, we survived by the skin of our teeth several moments where we almost didn’t survive, I can tell you," he revealed. "We were one of the last projects in the door of the previous iteration of the Marvel Disney Plus experiment, where they were saying yes to many things. And I think we can be anything."
"There was a period during our writing where many things at Marvel were looked at sort of through a new critical lens of what we can pare down. And we were definitely one of those things that was taken off their board for a moment there, and the producers who were part of our project fought like hell to convince people this is something worth continuing with."
Praising Marvel Studios for sticking with the series when there was a very real chance that it would be scrapped (half the series had been shot, leaving it vulnerable to being axed during the strikes), Guest confirmed that there were never plans for Wonder Man to be "part of a larger story."
It being a standalone project might be what ultimately saved Simon Williams and Trevor Slattery. Despite that, Guest admits elsewhere in the interview that learning the series wouldn't be released until 2026 was a hard pill to swallow. Still, it worked out in the end.
Hawkeye and Wonder Man are both streaming on Disney+. The former has also received a SteelBook release.