Because Disney+ and Marvel’s What If is an anthology collection, every of its self-contained episodes will be appreciated as particular person tales set throughout the MCU’s increasing multiverse. As an entire, although, What If is establishing simply how necessary the multiverse itself goes to be for the MCU’s future, one thing that’s beforehand been alluded to in collection like WandaVision and Loki.

Following the occasions of Loki, the MCU is poised to descend into its new multiverse with characters like Doctor Strange, the Scarlet Witch, Loki, and America Chavez coping with the brand new establishment in Sam Raimi’s upcoming Multiverse of Madness. The new Doctor Strange film’s premise and its connections to Spider-Man: No Way Home each dovetail with Loki’s introduction of the multiverse in a means that has made it appear to be the studio’s movie plans have been its first precedence. But when io9 just lately caught up with What If’s head author A.C. Bradley and collection director Bryan Andrews, the pair defined how their plan to broach the multiverse was an impartial one which got here lengthy earlier than they have been made conscious of what their friends have been engaged on.

“We were already deep in development and writing the show by the time Loki got up and running,” mentioned Bradley, who signed onto What If again within the fall of 2018. “So we had a meeting and talked about what we wanted to do with the multiverse—kind of as an aside—because Doctor Strange 2 was still in the very early stages.” Because of the liberty and suppleness that comes from What If’s being an animated anthology, Bradley likened the collection to a sampler of various sweets meant to present you a style of what all is feasible now that the multiverse is in play. But she additionally emphasised that she left a lot of the multiversal “rules-building and all that to the Loki team and the Doctor Strange team.”

“Basically I was like, OK, I’m just going to go and show all the fun we can have in the multiverse,” Bradley mentioned. “I’m going to show all the things that can happen and the places we can go, I’m not going to lay down any serious rules I’m not going to touch anything to do with the TVA.” Once What If was totally in manufacturing, a number of the big-picture connective tissue that Marvel head Kevin Feige was engineering grew to become extra clear to the present’s inventive crew. According to Andrews, although, there was much less direct collaboration between What If and different Marvel tasks and extra of a normal understanding that Marvel’s govt management have been aiming for all of those tales to align as soon as completed.

“Not until we were already working on it did we find out, ‘Oh, by the way, the next Doctor Strange is going to be Multiverse of Madness,’ and we were like ‘Wait, what?’” Andrews recalled. “It’s funny because like the people making those movies and shows would check—Kevin and Brad [Winderbaum, Marvel Studios’ vice president of production and development] would show them where we were at because we were already moving before they were.”

After this primary batch of episodes, there’s going to be at the least another season of What If tales pulled from the preliminary batch of pitches Andrews and the remainder of the inventive crew gave to Feige. While Andrews is personally pleased with all the pieces they did with what What If and has some thought about what would possibly come subsequent, he emphasised that Feige “and the top brass—they’re the ones really orchestrating stuff, and sometimes we’re just busy with the mission statement that we have.”

What If hits Disney+ on August 11.

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