As we're sure you've now realised after our recent WandaVision coverage, the Disney+ series could have turned out very different. Now, Head Writer Jac Schaeffer has shared one of the biggest alterations in regards to how Agatha Harkness was portrayed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
While the version we saw was a full-blown villain who wanted to take control of the Scarlet Witch's powers, Marvel Studios once planned to stick a little closer to the comic books. In that earlier iteration of WandaVision, Agatha was set to serve as a mentor to Wanda Maximoff, teaching her how to control her powers. As a result, part of the show's ending was to change in a significant way.
"In the original conception, Agatha’s character was more in the mentor and magic-expert space," Schaeffer says. "One of the things that never changed was that in the finale, Wanda would have to say goodbye to Vision. In my original notion of it, that goodbye was like a final binding spell that she had to do. And it was tied to a spell that Agatha had taught her early in the series, where a gravy tureen had shattered, and Agatha taught her this very basic binding spell. In the end, what she has to do is integrate her trauma, and she has to bind Vision back to herself with that spell. Agatha ended up becoming more of an antagonistic force, because we needed that in the series."
"There was more dissection of the idea of chaos magic [the source of Wanda’s powers] in the [writers] room, too," she added. "When we hired Matt, there was a long period where we were trying to design a chaos dimension, which ended up not serving us and wasn’t necessary."
It's no wonder we spotted that Wonder Man concept art in a featurette for WandaVision, because Marvel clearly explored a lot of different ideas for the show that didn't end up making it to the screen.
The door was definitely left open for Agatha to return, though, with at least a hint that she might become a mentor to Wanda who could teach the hero more about the magic-based powers she never knew she had. When and where Harkness could show up again is hard to say, though there has been plenty of speculation online that it will happen in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.