Don’t expect to see all the same faces we’ve become accustomed to in the Marvel movies when Joss Whedon’s S.H.I.E.L.D. comes to television on ABC.
According to MTV’s Josh Horowitz’s interview with Whedon at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the director was promoting MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, Whedon revealed he is “very far” in development of the show “with a full framework and a full cast,” and that the cast would consist of new characters not seen in the Marvel cinematic universe hitherto.
“It’s new characters. It needs to be its own thing. It needs to be adjacent [to the Marvel cinematic universe] but you don’t want to do a show where you’re constantly going, ‘Iron Man just left, but he was totally here a minute ago.’ You want them to do their own thing, and say, well, what does S.H.I.E.L.D. have that the other superheroes don’t? And that, to me, is that they’re not superheroes, but they live in that universe. Even though they’re a big organization, that [lack of powers] makes them underdogs, and that’s interesting to me.”
This sounds like Mr. Whedon is crafting the show specifically for the television format, treating the characters as seriously as the big-name superheroes in the movies—and I’m curious to see how they’ll pull if off without saying “Iron Man was just here,” if it really is to be set in the same universe.
