Who the hell is Wonder Man? If you caught the teaser for Marvel’s television slate that’s floating around the web today—which also included release dates for the miniseries Ironheart, the Daredevil semi-reboot Born Again, and the animated series Eyes of Wakanda and Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man—there’s a chance you’re asking yourself that question (it certainly came up in the GQ Slack today.) Even by Marvel-diehard standards, this is a pretty deep-cut character, so there’s a good reason for hearty skepticism around this project.
Wonder Man, AKA Simon Williams, was created by Stan Lee, Don Heck, and Jack Kirby, and first debuted 60 years ago this month (!) in The Avengers #9. In Marvel lore, he’s initially a villain; Williams inherits a weapons factory after the death of his father, which puts him in competition with Tony Stark and Stark Industries. From there, Simon goes to jail after embezzling funds from his company. Blaming Stark, he cuts a deal with Baron Zemo and Enchantress to get superpowers and go after Iron Man. That story ends with Wonder Man seemingly dead; the character was then sidelined for a few years after Marvel’s chief rival DC pointed out that they’d introduced a character by the same name in an issue of Superman one year earlier in 1963.
Despite these complications, he soon resurfaced in the pages of Avengers and continued to appear there and in other Marvel titles over the years, often as a pawn of a few different villains (including Ultron, who in the comics copies Williams’ brain to create The Vision) before ending up on the side of good and becoming a founding member of the West Coast Avengers, where he ends up in a bit of a love triangle between Vision and the Scarlet Witch.
But Williams’ biggest defining characteristic in the comics, complicated backstory aside, is that in addition to being a superhero he’s also an actor. Before the West Coast Avengers team takes shape, he’s already on the ground in Los Angeles, having parlayed his work as a superpowered movie stuntman into a leading-man career. Based on the brief teaser footage we’ve seen from the Disney+ show, the series—helmed by Shang-Chi director Destin Daniel Cretton and Community‘s Andrew Guest—will lean into that aspect of the story. The MCU version of Simon Williams, played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II—Aquaman‘s Black Manta and Matrix: Resurrections‘ young Morpheus—is a struggling actor who (deep breath) is auditioning for the role of a superhero called Wonder Man on a show-within-a-show called Wonder Man.
With this little tidbit, Wonder Man—the actual Disney+ miniseries, not the fake show—is seemingly positioning itself to be (sigh) a metacommentary on superhero stories and Hollywood writ large. Basically, Wonder Man has the potential to be a MCU-ified version of HBO’s superhero-moviemaking satire The Franchise, which just premiered a few weeks ago. That’s probably why Ben Kingsley’s Trevor Slattery is in the mix. If you remember, he was an actor hired to play The Mandarin back in Iron Man 3 before we got the real version of the character in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, played by the legendary Tony Leung.
Wonder Man first popped up as a forthcoming project during Marvel’s heat-check streak of greenlighting any number of Disney+ series, and it’s still an open question if the Wonder Man lore is sufficient to fuel an open-ended TV show. But the meta-Hollywood stuff, if done right, could lend itself to a good show—especially if Marvel’s willing to look in the mirror about some of its missteps in the last few years. And if they’re willing to put him in a safari jacket.
Wonder Man hits Disney+ in December 2025.
