Marvel Studios may seem to swallow up everything in its path, but one corner of the pop-culture universe has long kept the behemoth at bay: Hollywood awards and the expensive campaigns surrounding them. You could throw a visual-effects nomination The Avengers’ way, maybe, or give Guardians of the Galaxy a (futile) run for its screenplay, but the big races? The Academy was too finicky, too highbrow, too removed to stump for a superhero movie in a major way. In speaking about the MCU at large back in 2017, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige told Vanity Fair, “We’re not going to get many other kinds of awards.” Not a controversial statement.
What a difference a few years and some splashy television debuts make. Following Black Panther’s historic Oscar wins in 2019, the MCU now looks primed to crash 2021’s top Emmy races with WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, its first two Disney+ series, joining the fray. Crafty, innovative sequels to earlier films, they herald a new prestige era for Marvel, with FYC billboards currently hovering around Los Angeles. (The studio also recently held a drive-in Rose Bowl event targeting voters, with talent from both shows zooming in virtually.)
For Nate Moore, executive-producer on Panther as well as Falcon, this marks a shift of cultural relevance—making work that, while still providing escapism, explores timely issues with greater richness than a simple line of dialogue or good-versus-evil construct. “They’re dealing with real issues that people feel very personally,” he says, specifically citing Panther and Falcon’s examinations of race (in both historical and present-day contexts). But while Panther hewed closer to the traditional MCU playbook, the freedom of longer-form storytelling in TV—and the possibility inherent in developing a new streamer’s identity—has reframed the idea of what an MCU production can be.
These projects “have components that are not as commonplace in some of our films,” Moore says. And Mary Livanos (a coexecutive producer on WandaVision, who’s also executive-producing the next Captain Marvel movie, The Marvels) sees them having a larger creative impact on the MCU overall: “WandaVision has helped prove that Marvel Studios is capable of telling unexpected stories in new formats, with depth that’s not usually associated with your typical blockbuster.”
Television is not new for Marvel. The studio had even waded into the streaming era previously, with a slate of buzzy Netflix originals that included Jessica Jones and Luke Cage. But these pricey coproductions between companies died off, having failed to capture an MCU-sized fandom. Working off of the movies more directly, by contrast, Disney+ had that fandom baked in from the jump, making space for greater artistic ambition.
Moore and co-E.P. Zoie Nagelhout developed Falcon together before finding and tapping Malcolm Spellman as showrunner. The series, submitted as a continuing drama at the Emmys, takes place six months after the events of Avengers: Endgame, and follows Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) as they wrestle with their legacy, trauma, and future. “Whether or not we got it right is not for us to say, but the intent was to investigate and interrogate what [it] means to be Black in America—and what is more American than holding the mantle of Captain America?” says Moore, referencing the story line leading to Sam wielding the famous shield.
Falcon drew praise for the nuanced, naturalistic conversations between Sam and Bucky. In a very un-studio-movie kind of way, that dialogue allowed Spellman and company to freely navigate some thorny thematic terrain. The show’s Marvel-based producers had to learn the ropes, though. “We brought our movie-making sensibility…and Malcolm [came] in, saying, ‘Here’s how you can craft the story. Do things that are unexpected and subvert expectations,’” Nagelhout says. “He was teaching us on the ground.” Adds Moore: “We’re like, ‘We’ve got two hours: plot, plot, plot, plot, plot!’ But Malcolm said, ‘Stop, TV is character-driven, it doesn’t matter what the plot is.’”
This came as a refreshing sort of shock. “It forced us out of our comfort zone,” Moore says. He’d ask about the mechanics of executing a complicated set piece, and Spellman, ever the TV veteran (Empire, Truth Be Told), would respond by asking about “the conversation” that leads to it. Moore and Nagelhout point to several long, quiet scenes—a phone call, a homecoming—as examples where they’d gleefully say to each other, “Well, we’d never do that in a movie.”
That may change now—or at least, what would once be cut entirely may now find new life. “We’re coming from a place of breaking stories over two hours—you end up having to keep things very slim,” says Nagelhout. But what doesn’t live in film doesn’t need to die. Falcon’s season one story will likely continue in a new Captain America film, and from there, the show will likely return for a new season. This feeding between mediums allows the kind of subtle filmmaking that gets squeezed out of blockbuster Marvel movies to become fodder for awards-bound series. “It used to be, five years ago, ‘Man, we can’t have that scene’—so that scene just doesn’t exist,” Moore says. “Now it’s, ‘We can’t have that scene here, but I bet we could figure out how to have that scene in the show.’”
To oscillate between popcorn and prestige requires exactly what Marvel has: a wealth of creative resources and source material, an insatiable demand for their content, and a track record so bulletproof that the lane for risk-taking seems ever-widening. Take WandaVision, Disney+’s debut Marvel offering, which finds Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and her android-partner Vision (Paul Bettany) seemingly trapped in an alt-sitcom, post-Endgame universe. Riffing on classic sitcoms, launching production in front of a live studio audience, evolving into a hybrid of MCU-story-continuation and deep meditation on grief—there’s nothing like it, anywhere.
Livanos helped assemble WandaVision’s writers room, which is led by Black Widow cowriter Jac Schaeffer, and saw it through postproduction. She says she came to the project thinking about the lauded limited series it’s now set to compete against: “Us being huge fans of prestige TV, we were all eager to create the sort of setups and cliff-hangers that we ourselves as audience members loved.” This was fused with a Marvel sensibility that wound up being key to its quality: “This show was like a nine-episode comic book run. Each episode could feel wholly authentic contained within [itself], but held together by an overall arc.”
The show was an instance of Marvel taking a character well-established in its films, and giving her an artistically radical new life. “It really feels good, even if nothing happens, to be a part of a conversation about people acknowledging work that was done,” Olsen recently told V.F.’s Little Gold Men, of her longtime role suddenly being an Emmy contender. Livanos says assembling the writers room was about looking for “kind, empathetic individuals who cared so deeply about Wanda Maximoff and her emotional journey, and doing the character real justice.” Indeed, “the core of the story is what has really propelled [WandaVision]” to the Emmy buzz now surrounding it, she argues. Quite a leap, from the post-credits cameo in The Winter Soldier that introduced her, for the Scarlet Witch.
There’s something of a meeting in the middle happening here too. While Marvel keeps pace in this more narratively audacious direction, the Emmys, particularly, have begun leaning toward more populist, commercial fare. Much of this has to do with the splintering of television audiences, and the sheer amount of content and platforms we all wade through now; the biggest stuff tends to plow through by virtue of merely having enough eyeballs on them. Even the most well-reviewed small dramas can struggle, while the middling final season of Game of Thrones cleaned up at the Emmys. So even though WandaVision, and especially Falcon, drew more criticism in their later episodes, this may not work against them, exactly. The debate at least proves people are paying attention.
The Television Academy is also getting younger—and more attuned to overarching pop-culture trends and more accepting of franchise content. Disney+’s The Mandalorian earned a shocker of a drama-series nomination for its first season last year, before becoming more of a critical darling for its recent sophomore run. (Falcon already has serious intra-I.P.-driven competition to contend with.) The size of the Marvel Emmys wave remains to be seen—WandaVision is the safer bet for a decent haul—but regardless, we’re at an inflection point. Just as Netflix tested Oscars’ waters not so long ago, if at first the studio doesn’t succeed, it’ll try and try again.
Back in his 2017 Vanity Fair interview, Feige was clearly proud of the good reviews many of his films had received, highlighting the “Certified Fresh” plaques that Rotten Tomatoes would send Marvel. “We got them lined up around here,” he said at the time. “We take pride in it.” Hopefully he’s made some room since then—before too long, they’ll have company.
Additional reporting by Joanna Robinson
— How the 2021 Emmys Will Define One of TV’s Strangest, Most Important Years
— We’re Predicting the 2022 Oscar Winners. What Could Go Wrong?
— V.F. Portraits: Gillian Anderson, Hugh Grant, Jurnee Smollett, and More
— Are the Daytime Emmy Nominations Even Weirder Than Usual?
— Kate Winslet Has Now Entered the Most Thrilling Actress Race at the Emmys
— From the Archive: Who Stole the 2000 Oscar Statuettes?
— Sign up for the “HWD Daily” newsletter for must-read industry and awards coverage—plus a special weekly edition of Awards Insider.