Agatha All Along is a critical, but more intensely, audience hit, with the series already creating its own cluster of superfans who want to see more of this corner of the universe.
While I too would like to see more Wiccan and Agatha and Rio and all the rest, I think Marvel needs to recognize what Agatha All Along and WandaVision showrunner Jac Schaeffer has done with her MCU projects, and in the long term, I think a James Gunn ascendancy arc may be in order from her, given her obvious talent.
We’re getting ahead of ourselves, but we can look at the facts. She created WandaVision, which many have argued is the best Disney Plus MCU project we’ve gotten, and easily the best characterization we’ve seen of Scarlet Witch among four movies now. Then, she moved on to its spin-off, Agatha All Along, which is also a top-tier MCU series, and some would say that it is the actual best one now. I certainly think you could make that case.
Jac Schaeffer clearly knows how to oversee her writers and directors (and sometimes she writes and directs episodes herself) and bring out the best in these characters. Agatha is particularly noteworthy given that before this, she was probably the 265th most important character in Marvel lore and now she’s…one of its best-written characters with arguably the best MCU TV show under her belt. And Schaeffer was a part of two of the top three, depending on who you ask (Loki is usually the other one brought up in this conversation).
On Disney’s end, she also performed something of a miracle with Agatha in that she did all this with a wildly lower budget than almost every other Disney Plus series, and certainly the movies. Reportedly the budget of Agatha All Along was around $40 million, when a series like Loki cost $23 million per episode and Moon Knight reportedly cost $24 million for reasons I genuinely cannot fathom. It’s also a significant decline from her own past project, WandaVision, which was $25 million an episode, and clearly she knows how to do more with less. Not to say all her future projects would need to be dirt cheap, but she knows how to make the most out of whatever she’s given.
And what should she be given? Essentially whatever she wants. She has nothing to do with the Wanda-adjacent Vision project. She seems most likely to potentially move to a Wiccan project, continuing his and Agatha’s story, but that’s not confirmed. She says that she does not know anything about Scarlet Witch’s return or a solo feature for her but I mean, give her a Scarlet Witch solo feature! Clearly there is no one who understands this corner of the universe better, and if she keeps delivering, if the MCU continues on indefinitely, I think she should really rocket up the ranks based on being able to deliver quality storylines with many different characters in a way the MCU has recently lacked.
I have no doubt that Marvel will again turn to Schaeffer again for something. But I think she deserves a higher profile after what she’s done with her two shows so far. We’ll see if Disney agrees.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
