Don't Start Wonder Man on Disney Plus Until You've Seen These Marvel Movies

Marvel is about to roll out Wonder Man on Disney Plus, and the early buzz is strong. We're talking one of the better Rotten Tomatoes scores for any MCU TV run to date, with at least one outlet tossing it a near-perfect 4.5/5. If you felt a little burned by some recent small-screen detours, this one looks like a course correction.

What Wonder Man actually is

Created by Andrew Guest and Destin Daniel Cretton, Wonder Man is an eight-episode comedy drama about Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a working Hollywood actor who also happens to have superpowers he's trying to keep under wraps. That becomes a problem when he auditions to play Wonder Man in a Wonder Man remake. Yes, very meta. Along the way he teams up with Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley), the world's most chaotic former thespian, and the two hustle to land their gigs without everything blowing up around them.

The "do I need homework?" part

This is a Marvel Spotlight series, which is Marvel's way of telling you the barrier to entry is basically nil. You don't need to have a PhD in MCU lore to follow what's happening, because the story stands on its own and doesn't try to reshape the larger universe.

"[Spotlight projects] focus on more grounded, character-driven stories with less impact on the larger MCU narrative."

Worth noting: Spotlight is its own thing, separate from the Marvel Animation and Marvel Television banners. Echo was the first show to wear the Spotlight label. Even though Echo spun out of Hawkeye, you could watch it cold and still track the plot just fine. Same idea here.

Want extra context? Watch these first

• Iron Man 3 (2013): This is where Ben Kingsley's Trevor Slattery first turns up. Marketing sold him as the Mandarin, a classic Iron Man villain and supposed head of the Ten Rings. In the movie, he's actually a washed-up, drug-addled actor hired by Aldrich Killian and AIM to play a terrorist on camera while the real villains work in the shadows. It's also a legitimately good look at Tony Stark's PTSD after The Avengers.
• Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings: Slattery pops back up here. The Ten Rings once sentenced him to death, but their leader, Xu Wenwu, decided Trevor's Shakespeare routine was too entertaining to waste and kept him around as a court jester. He sobered up in captivity and later gets sprung by Shang-Chi. Directed by Wonder Man co-showrunner Destin Daniel Cretton, with a stacked cast: Simu Liu, Awkwafina, Benedict Wong, Michelle Yeoh, and Tony Leung.

When and where to watch

Wonder Man drops all eight episodes on Disney Plus on January 27. Minimal homework (bless), strong word of mouth, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II opposite Ben Kingsley? I'm in.