We are joined now by the head of streaming television
and animation at Marvel Studios and the executive producer
of the incredible Marvel Studios' What If...?,
Brad Winderbaum.
Brad, how are you, my friend?
I'm good.
How are you doing?
Better now that you're here.
[LAUGHTER]
How's the convention been for you?
How's San Diego treating you?
It's so great to be back, you guys.
Not only because it feels like it's part of Marvel.
San Diego Comic-Con is just such a big part of what we do.
But also just being able to interact with the fans
again, and walk around and speak to real people,
and have that interaction.
Whether it's like someone you meet on the floor or the crowd
in the room that cheers for what you do,
that interactivity is the thing I think we've
all been yearning for and miss.
It's so great to be back and to have that again.
Love it.
One of the things that I also love
is you have one of the most fun jobs in the entire world,
right?
You get to help bring these stories to life.
You've got your hands on so many things.
What does a day in a life look like for you?
Shortened version.
[LAUGHTER]
We only have a couple of minutes.
A day in the life is like being able to just jump
from different fantasy world to a different fantasy world
and just always stay inspired.
And the thing that's so amazing is the level of talent
that we're able to work with at Marvel.
So you're meeting with these people
throughout the day that are just like so smart, so funny, so
lively, and just creative forces each one of them
in their own right.
So it really is a pleasure to go to work in the morning.
I'll put it I'll put it that way.
Nice, nice.
Well, before we talk about what's happening now,
I want to take a little step into the past.
Because you actually spearheaded the Marvel one-shot program had
such amazing expansions of the Marvel
Cinematic Universe Item 47, Agent Carter,
All Hail the King.
What was that like, really trying
to expand on these stories that we have really just seen
for the first time on the big screen
and being like now we want more?
And people want to illuminate more corners of this universe.
So let's talk about that.
Yeah.
I mean that's a great question.
Thanks so much for bringing that up.
That was kind of like the beginning
of my career as a development exec at Marvel
in a lot of ways.
When I first came into the company in a marketing role,
Kevin was really interested in making shorts.
The question was how.
And we were like, can we put it in front of the movies?
What can we do?
And it just turned out that on the home entertainment side
they were like, we will fund these things.
We'll do it.
So it opened up the door to us not just to tell stories
from other parts of the universe,
but weird obscure corners that you didn't even think you
wanted to see, like a couple that
finds a Chitauri weapon or Captain America's girlfriend.
What happened after the war?
And these things just blossomed.
I think that you can see the seeds of Damage Control,
and Spider-man Homecoming in Item 47.
And of course, Peggy Carter, she's just exploding.
She's such a big part of it, culminates the Infinity saga
with Steve and the future with Captain Carter
is still being written.
Speaking of the future, there was a very revealing panel
today about the future of Marvel Studios Animation where there
are a number of announcements that I think people are very
curious to hear about, like I am Groot,
Spider-man Freshman Year, Marvel Zombies,
which I got to say personally all I really want to hear
is about Marvel Zombies.
That's me.
So can you tell us a little bit about the announcements that
came out and what folks should be
looking forward to from Marvel Studios Animation?
Yeah.
Look like I said, it's been a long time
since we've been here.
And it's our first Marvel Studios Animation panel ever.
So we wanted to bring a lot of stuff and reveal a lot of stuff
to the fans.
You know, comic-con is always like a bit of a thank
you, right?
It's like thank you for the time investment
and investment of passion.
So you want to be able to like-- normally
you don't want to spoil things.
Except at Comic-Con, you do want to spoil them.
You got to spoil it all.
And but we're early days on so many of the shows
that we showed a lot of art.
We showed an animatic for X-Men '97.
X-Men '97, I mean just being able to hear
that theme music it like--
I don't know about you guys, but I'm like when I
hear it I'm like 11 years old.
Oh, it brings tears to my eyes every time.
Yeah.
So and that's what's so cool about animation.
I think a lot of us grew up, [INAUDIBLE]
even with the comics was animation.
That was the first time we got to see
really serialized tales of these characters week to week.
So how important is animation to telling these Marvel stories?
What is it about animation that really allows us to tell
stories in different ways?
I mean, it's an infinite canvas.
I work, not just on the animation side,
but also on the live action side.
And live action side there are just making movies,
making live action TV shows, there are just
natural limitations and walls that come up, just budgetary
and what you're able to do logistically in
an actual tangible environment.
And even when you have a movie or a show that
has a lot of CG or artificial environments,
there's still limitations there.
There's a ceiling of how much you can spend.
There's a time factor of how long
you need to actually make this stuff and make it look good.
Animation is not that way.
Animation is like you think of it.
It's the same.
Animating us having this conversation
or animating us on a rocket ship flying through space
is the same cost.
So you can just literally do whatever you want.
Well, speaking of the infinite possibilities,
we also got a really big announcement that What If...?
is getting another season.
And we have a season yet to come.
So is there anything that you could--
what are you excited for fans to see out of these,
not just out of What If...?, because I have a personal
investment, but all of the amazing animated projects that
are coming from Marvel Studios?
The fact that we have What If...?
going into a third season means that we can go
a little bit deeper with these characters,
especially the Watcher.
It's a multiverse story.
It's a serial.
They're standalone stories.
But there is a serialized aspect to it.
Because you have this narrator.
He loves the subjects of these stories.
He's the ultimate fanboy.
You know?
He's watching like we all watch.
And he loves these characters like we like we do.
We can dig a little deeper into what makes him tick.
And in the second season and then into the third season,
we get to know his humanity a lot more.
Well, that's--
And I cannot wait.
I'm so excited.
I want to talk to you all day about all this.
Because we love animation.
We love seeing these stories be told.
Brad thank you so much.
Thank you so, so much for joining us.
I'm just going to go think about that X-Men theme.
Put that in my ears for non-stop.
We're actually just going to go play.
We're going to do a nice trio.
We're going to harmonize.
It's going to be amazing.
Oh, it gets stuck in your head.
Yeah, thank you. It will.
Thank you so much for joining us.