Anghus Houvouras would like to see Marvel making a Vision and Scarlet Witch movie…
Earlier this week I talked at length about why The Inhumans was possibly pulled from the Marvel Movie slate. While I have nothing against The Inhumans, it was the Marvel movie I was the least interested in seeing brought to life. Its exclusion from the next phase doesn’t exactly feel like a tragedy. The conversations quickly turned into a discussion about what Marvel movies we want to see and I had an epiphany about which Marvel characters I’d be interested in seeing in their own movie.
Of course the first answer is Fin Fang Foom followed closely by Devil Dinosaur and Demolition Man – The Homeless Hobo Hero. However, since I traditionally work in realistic scenarios I decided to offer up a potential movie that Marvel has already laid the ground work for and that also could cover new territory that other films in the Cinematic Universe have not. The film:
Vision & The Scarlet Witch.
Marvel has done a lot right. I don’t need to waste words on the successes they’ve created in their takeover of the cineplex. They’ve done action, adventure, comedy, space opera, and super hero team ups with a margin of success that goes from adequate to awesome. One of the areas they haven’t really explored is relationships. Sure, you get them peppered in from time to time. Sometimes it’s nice and organic like Pepper and Tony in Iron Man. Sometimes it’s sweet and beautifully rendered like Peggy Carter and Steve Rogers in Captain America. Other times it’s an awkward shoehorned mess like Black Widow and Hulk in Avengers: Age of Ultron.
Love is rarely the point of a superhero movie. Lust is rarely a consideration, unless you count the rows of panting fanboys a little too focused on Scarlett Johansson’s constantly plunging zipper on her battle suit. Superhero movies are more about showing us how characters decide to put on tights rather than stripping out of them. The one movie type that Marvel hasn’t really given us thus far is a love story. What better one to tell than the most unconventional relationship in Marvel comics.
There’s a lot of great material that could be mined from the comics for Vision and Scarlet Witch. Their relationship was even considered odd back in the free-wheeling 1960’s when she first got silicon fever. The Vision was this amazing powerful cybernetic being with the memories of Simon Williams (aka Wonder Man) in his robotic brain. Their shared attraction and eventual relationship is the kind of science fiction drama that feels unexplored in our current slate of comic book cinema.
There’s also the added benefit of the current times we’re in, where artificial intelligence and robotic creations have gone from science fiction to science fact. The idea of the singularity, where the human experience could be housed in a computerized creation is decades away from becoming a reality. We’ve seen the topic somewhat covered in Spike Jonze’s exceptional Her, where a man and his Operating System enter into a complicated relationship. Imagine that level of drama with the added layer of superhero shenanigans, and you have the recipe for a very different Marvel movie.
The Vision is a fantastic character, one who has been relegated to the supporting ranks of Marvel Comics for many years. But as the latest Vision series by Tom King, Gabriel Hernandez Walta, Jordie Bellaire, and Clayton Cowles has proven, there are great existential questions revolving around the character as he struggles to exist in a world that is as perplexed with his existence as he is.
Scarlet Witch is another character with a great deal of potential. Sure her origin has dramatically changed with much of her story being gutted by the fact that Fox owns the movie rights to anything mutant related. That doesn’t mean you still couldn’t tell an interesting story with the genetically modified version of the character and her tragic background. There’s a potentially amazing love story that could be told here. Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen are talented actors capable of grounding this otherworldly tale of unexpected love.
Marvel needs to tell us a love story, and these are the perfect characters. Now we just need a title…
How about ‘Love in a Time of Thanos?’
I’ll keep thinking.
Anghus Houvouras is a North Carolina based writer and filmmaker and the co-host of Across the Pondcast. Follow him on Twitter.
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https://youtu.be/b7Ozs5mj5ao?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng
Originally published April 27, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
