The Hollywood Reporter broke the news this afternoon that Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton has teamed up with Andrew Guest to bring to life a Wonder Man series for Disney+. Guest is perhaps best known for producing and writing comedies like Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Community. Most recently, he was a consulting producer for Marvel's Hawkeye series. According to reports, Guest will write the series with Cretton on board to executive produce and potentially direct.
Simon Williams, whose alter ego is Wonder Man, is one of the oldest superheroes in the Marvel line-up, but he is far less as well known as the likes of Captain America, Iron Man, or Black Widow. The character was first introduced by Stan Lee in the 1964 issue of The Avengers #9, but he didn't really become a pivotal character until the 1980s when he became a founding member of the spin-off group, the West Coast Avengers. Given the fact that Hawkeye and Wonder Man are both members of this superhero group, that may explain why Guest was involved with the Hawkeye series that premiered last year.
The Wonder Man news comes on the heels of the announcement last week that Marvel had found a director for their upcoming Thunderbolts film, which adds to the intrigue of this new report. With The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Black Widow, and Hawkeye it has become clear that Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is creating her own little group of misfits, including US Agent (Wyatt Russell) and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), which may give a clue as to what direction Marvel is headed with their antihero team up in Thunderbolts. It just so happens that Simon Williams has his own connections to one of the Thunderbolt's most iconic members—Baron Zemo (Daniel Brühl).
In most versions of Williams' origin story, he is the son of one of Tony Stark's biggest competitors, the munitions tycoon, Sanford Williams. After the elder Williams dies, Simon inherits the factory and faces a significant financial loss due to Stark Industries' success. Desperate, Simon decides to embezzle funds which leads to him being arrested and thrown in jail, and it puts him right in the crosshair of someone who wants to use his vendetta against Stark. Zemo recruits him and turns him into a super-powered human with the assistance of the Enchantress, with the intent of using him to eventually infiltrate the Avengers and destroy them from within. Of course, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has gone in a very different direction with Zemo's plans to destroy the Avengers—which actually worked—and most of the key players of the Avengers are dead or... on the moon. But all of that doesn't change the fact that in the comics, Wonder Man got his name (and powers) thanks to Zemo's evil scheming.
Whatever Marvel's plan is, it doesn't sound like we'll have to wait too long to get more news. The Hollywood Reporter indicated that despite still being in the early stages, filming on the Wonder Man series could begin as early as 2023.