In case you haven’t heard, Marvel Studios will go head-to-head with Warner Bros. in one of the biggest box office battles of the year when Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three hit theaters on December 18. But long before “Dunesday” arrives, Marvel is kicking off 2026 with a release on the small screen: Wonder Man.
Created by Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest, Wonder Man premieres on Tuesday, when all eight of its episodes will launch on Disney+. The new streaming series is just the second TV show, after 2024’s Echo, to appear under the Marvel Spotlight banner, which contains grounded, character-driven stories that prioritize smaller stakes over larger MCU continuity. In the case of Wonder Man, Marvel is setting aside its multiversal affairs for some Hollywood satire: The series centers on an actor named Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who’s hoping to land a starring role in a superhero movie while hiding his own superpowers.
Wonder Man arrives following several years of delays that stemmed from the 2023 writers and actors strikes, as well as the reduction of Marvel’s output amid the company’s box office disappointments and creative overhaul of its TV business. Like Ironheart before it, Wonder Man was shelved for more than a year after its completion. In the interim, two other TV shows with similar interests in Hollywood—2024’s The Franchise, on HBO Max, and 2025’s Emmy-winning The Studio, on Apple TV—were released, with the former series (which was canceled after one season) spoofing superhero cinema and the latter sending up the moviemaking business writ large. As a result, Wonder Man may have lost some of its novelty within the wider TV landscape, and some viewers might not be inclined to watch yet another meta TV series about Hollywood.
Still, Wonder Man represents a refreshing change of pace for Marvel, and its lower stakes could be just the kind of reset the studio needs as it ramps up its (rather desperate) Doomsday marketing. Ahead of the show’s debut, let’s dive into its fairly low-profile title character’s origins, the show’s MCU connections, and everything else you need to know.
Introducing: Simon Williams
After his Emmy-winning performance as Doctor Manhattan in 2019’s Watchmen and a pair of stints playing Aquaman villain Black Manta, Abdul-Mateen is leaving the DC universe to enter the MCU as Wonder Man’s eponymous superhero, whose real name is Simon Williams. And though Wonder Man will mark the character’s live-action debut, Williams has a rich (and rather convoluted) history in the comics.
Created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Don Heck, Williams made his first appearance in 1964’s Avengers no. 9. Like many Marvel characters who later became superheroes, Simon was first introduced as a villain. As far as crimes in a fantastic universe of superhumans and gods go, Williams got caught doing something incredibly ordinary: embezzling. Williams, the son of a rich industrialist, inherited his father’s munitions company and got desperate after profits began to fall thanks to its greatest competitor, Stark Industries. When Simon gets bailed out by Baron Zemo’s Masters of Evil, he agrees to Zemo’s plot for Williams to undergo a procedure to gain superhuman abilities and infiltrate the Avengers to destroy them from within.
Williams gains ionic powers that grant him superstrength and invincibility. But those abilities come with a catch: The same ionic rays that transformed him are also killing him, and Zemo—naturally—has the only antidote. Taking on the persona of “Wonder Man,” Simon plays the role of a superhero to gain the trust of the Avengers and eventually betrays them. However, Simon then changes his mind and helps rescue the Avengers after they’re captured, seemingly dooming himself in the process. By the end of his very first comic book appearance, Simon is believed to be dead—and that wouldn’t be the last time he seemed to meet his demise.
For the purposes of setting the scene for Wonder Man, we don’t need to get into Simon’s numerous deaths and subsequent resurrections in the comics. We don’t even really need to delve into his bizarre family tree, which includes his brother, Eric (who becomes the villainous Grim Reaper after Simon’s first supposed death), and Vision, the superhero synthezoid whose brain patterns were based on Simon’s. (After all, Vision’s MCU origins predate Wonder Man’s imminent introduction by so long that Vision has already died and been resurrected on-screen.) What’s most relevant to the new Disney+ series is Simon’s double life as a superhero and actor.
After Williams eventually joins the Avengers in the comics, he visits a movie theater with his furry friend and Avengers teammate, Beast, to watch The Adventures of Robin Hood:
Although Williams was apparently unimpressed with Errol Flynn’s performance as the legendary outlaw, the film sparked the hero’s interest in cinema. He’d later leave the Avengers to pursue a career in acting, using his unique talents to get some work as a stuntman:
Williams helped form the West Coast Avengers team in an effort to expand the Avengers’ operations. By the time Simon got his own comic series, Wonder Man, in the early ’90s, Williams had grown into a celebrity because of his heroics on and off the screen. It took some time for Marvel to figure out this dynamic, but it would become a central component of the character.
In the MCU’s Wonder Man, Simon’s interest in acting will be front and center as he pursues the starring role in the upcoming reboot of his favorite childhood superhero movie: Wonder Man. The character’s villainous origins and connections to already established characters like Baron Zemo, Vision, and Wanda Maximoff (with whom Simon has a complicated romantic relationship) likely won’t factor into the events of a mostly self-contained story. But Wonder Man is a powerful superhero with plenty of ties to the Avengers, so there’s always a chance that he’ll end up appearing in another MCU project after the completion of his limited series.
Reintroducing: Trevor Slattery
Wonder Man may be a show about Simon Williams, but it also marks the return of a character who was introduced all the way back in 2013’s Iron Man 3: Trevor Slattery, played by Ben Kingsley. And Trevor has had quite the journey to get here.
In Iron Man 3, Trevor emerges as a terrorist known as the Mandarin. He delivers threatening video messages addressed to the U.S. president, which are broadcast across the country, and he claims credit for a number of bombings at military bases and landmarks. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), whose suits of armor have all been destroyed, tracks this villain to a mansion in Miami. And there, he discovers that the Mandarin is nothing more than a hired actor:
“Well, I, um, had a little problem with, um, substances,” Trevor explains, as Stark aims his gun at him. “And I ended up doing things—no two ways about it—in the street that a man shouldn’t do.”
“Next?” Stark demands.
“Then, they approached me about the role, and they knew about the drugs,” Trevor continues.
“What did they say?” Stark asks. “They’d get you off them?”
“They said they’d give me more,” Trevor says. “They gave me things. They gave me this palace. They gave me plastic surgery. … And the thing was, he needed someone to take credit for some accidental explosions.”
As Stark quickly pieces together, Trevor was hired by the true villain of Iron Man 3, Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), and the Mandarin was never the real threat. This quirky, clueless thespian merely stumbled into what he thought was another performance. By the end of the movie, Trevor is in handcuffs on his way to prison.
Although Kingsley delivered a fun, comedic performance as Trevor, the film’s depiction of the menacing Mandarin relies on Islamophobic tropes and images that echo the franchise’s unsavory introduction of the Ten Rings in 2008’s Iron Man. Even beyond these issues (which definitely didn’t get enough attention at the time), Marvel’s decision to feature the Mandarin and then reveal him to be a fake was a bold, controversial choice. The Mandarin was a storied yet outdated Iron Man villain who was built on racist, anti-Asian stereotypes. Rather than doing the work to modernize the character, director Shane Black, writer Drew Pearce, and Marvel’s executives decided to deploy Kingsley’s Slattery in a bait and switch to subvert the audience’s expectations.
Slattery made his next MCU appearance in 2014’s Marvel One-Shot: All Hail the King, a 12-minute short film that delves into the question: “Who is Trevor Slattery?” It follows Trevor’s new life in prison before a reporter conducts an interview with the man he refers to as “the most infamous prisoner in America.” The short leans into Kingsley’s comedic performance as it briefly explores Slattery’s Shakespearean roots and his relationship with his mother, but eventually it reveals its true purpose: to tease the introduction of the real Mandarin.
The reporter, who’s secretly a member of the Ten Rings, cuts his interview with Slattery short so he can capture the oblivious actor and prepare him to meet the legendary warlord whose identity he’s stolen. It’s all a pretty desperate bit of course correcting on Marvel’s part; as Black described it to Uproxx, All Hail the King was “an apology to fans who were so angry” about his film’s portrayal of the Mandarin. Of course, it also served as a promise that the true villain would eventually arrive in the MCU.
Seven years later, the Mandarin would get his proper big-screen introduction in 2021’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, directed by Wonder Man’s Cretton. And better yet, Marvel somehow convinced the great Tony Leung Chiu-wai to make his Hollywood debut in the role. The film wisely drops the antiquated villain name, replacing it with Xu Wenwu, and even directly acknowledges his dubious false start in the MCU.
“A funny story,” Wenwu begins to tell Awkwafina’s Katy over dinner. “Some years ago, a terrorist from America needed a bogeyman to bring your country to its knees. So he appropriated the Ten Rings. My Ten Rings. But because he didn’t know my actual name, he invented a new one. Do you know the name he chose? The Mandarin. He gave his figurehead the name of a chicken dish. And it worked. America was terrified. Of an orange.”
But Shang-Chi doesn’t stop there: The film also features Slattery in his surprise comeback. Not long after that dinner, Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) and his crew are locked away by his father, and they run into the Liverpool actor turned jester as he prepares for his next performance. Dressed in his Shakespearean wardrobe, Trevor helpfully recaps his strange life since Iron Man 3 in a spirited—and lengthy—expositional monologue.
“Some time ago, I was offered the role of a terrorist,” Trevor explains. “I know—facile, trite. I couldn’t agree more. But times were lean, you know what I mean? Anyway, the producer told me he worked for the BBC. But—ironic twist—it turns out he, in fact, was a terrorist, and I wasn’t playing a character at all, but what I now recognize to be a rather unflattering portrait of your father. We all got our just deserts. The producer got blown up by Iron Man, and I served time in federal prison, which turned out to be the best thing for me. I got clean; I rediscovered my passion.”
“Then my dad broke you out?” Shang-Chi asks.
“Exactly,” Trevor replies.
“To kill you,” Shang-Chi continues.
“Exactly,” Trevor says. “But just as his men were tying me up for my execution, I launched into a performance of my Macbeth. … They couldn’t get enough of it. I’ve been doing weekly gigs for the lads ever since.”
Trevor and his hundun friend, Morris—a faceless, winged creature whom only Trevor can (inexplicably) understand—proceed to help Shang-Chi escape and find Ta Lo, a mystical village in an alternate dimension. And though he doesn’t do much to help in the epic, third-act battle that follows, Trevor still survives the dramatic conflict by relying on his greatest weapon: acting.
Now, Trevor is set to return in Wonder Man as Kingsley reprises his role and reunites with Cretton. The TV series takes place during Trevor’s first time back in America since Wenwu’s men sprang him from prison, and he’s here to help Simon make his big break in Hollywood. Or so it seems …
The Long Road to Wonder Man
On the official Marvel podcast, Marvel Studios executive Brad Winderbaum recently said that Wonder Man started off, in part, as a story centered on Trevor Slattery before it grew into something else entirely.
“Destin Cretton and [producer] Jonathan Schwartz were making Shang-Chi with Sir Ben and talking about doing some sort of show with Trevor Slattery,” Winderbaum explained. “Simultaneously, [producers] Stephen Broussard and Brian Gay were tossing around doing a Simon Williams project and ‘What does that look like? And how can we do Wonder Man?’ And both ideas were poking at an actor’s journey story. … The ideas naturally merged, and all of a sudden, we had this amazing two-hander start to manifest itself between Trevor Slattery and Simon Williams.”
As I mentioned at the top of this piece, Wonder Man has been delayed significantly by production stoppages and spent more than a year on the shelf even after being completed. The series was once rumored to be getting mothballed entirely by Marvel, and even Guest recently acknowledged that it could have been a tax write-off for Disney after production was halted halfway through filming due to the Hollywood strikes. But the superhero dramedy finally arrives this week, and it’s received rave early reviews from critics, scoring a 93 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Soon enough, we’ll see whether Wonder Man was worth the wait.
