Marvel‘s Eyes of Wakanda animated spin-off anthology series will be taking viewers back to the titular nation much sooner than expected. In an exclusive conversation with Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Todd Harris confirmed that all four episodes, which were originally set to premiere on August 27, will now arrive on Disney+ on August 1. It’s a big shock considering the team hasn’t gotten a ton of chances to speak out about the project, and all that’s been seen is a short teaser. Moreover, the news is a nice update to tide fans over since Marvel decided to skip San Diego Comic-Con this year.
Harris has been hard at work conceiving Eyes of Wakanda since back when Ryan Coogler debuted his first Black Panther movie starring the late Chadwick Boseman in 2018. It wasn’t until the Annecy International Animation Film Festival earlier this year that he finally got the chance to show off the first episode and share the vision he’d been toiling away at for years. The miniseries expands on the history of Coogler‘s Wakanda, following the Hatut Zaraze, “CIA-like” warriors tasked with retrieving priceless vibranium artifacts from throughout time. Episode 1 starts far back in 1260 B.C., with each episode hopping through the locale’s mythology with some surprises and killer fight scenes along the time-traveling journey. All of it serves to show how the current Wakanda and Black Panther viewers are familiar with came to be.
During his interview with EW, the showrunner shed some light on the first episode, which he described as an “inciting incident” not just for the show, but all of Wakandan history. It centers on Noni (Winnie Harlow), a new candidate for the Hatut Zaraze on a mission to stop the warlord known as The Lion (Cress Williams), who plans to march on Crete with stolen Wakandan technology. The “James Bond” style mission to retrieve the artifacts is more than just a fun, historical spy thriller, but a reflection of the history of Wakanda’s formation, with some heavy inspirations for its world-changing villain:
“We always knew we needed an inciting incident. I kind of went off of Apocalypse Now. What if Wakanda turned into their Colonel? That combined with a Thulsa Doom, an Atlantian in Conan who was from a much older civilization, who created as an empire off of the existing world. So with those two themes going into it, that’s the kind of thing that would bring Wakanda into the situation where legitimate resources have to be put towards it.”
Who Will Star in ‘Eyes of Wakanda’?
In addition to Harlow and Williams, Eyes of Wakanda has assembled a stellar ensemble that also features Anika Noni Rose and Steve Toussaint in major roles, alongside Patricia Belcher, Larry Herron, Adam Gold, Lynn Whitfield, Jacques Colimon, Jona Xiao, Isaac Robinson-Smith, Gary Anthony Williams, and Zeke Alton. As Harris previously confirmed at the show’s Annecy panel, Iron Fist will also have a hand in this story at some point, though it won’t be Finn Jones‘s version of the character. Back in May, he teased a very different variant who will go head-to-head, or fist to fist, with the Wakandans. Rest assured, though, this will be more than a cameo, ingraining Iron Fist’s epic comic history into Coogler‘s world and paving the way for some other surprising MCU crossovers.
“Man, I love Marvel. I can’t say too much, but when I say Iron Fist shows up, I was explaining to one of the people there, like, ‘Do you understand how amazing an Iron Fist is? An Iron Fist walked into a cave with a dragon, and he had no superpowers, and walked out with superpowers, and the dragon was dead.’”
All four episodes of Eyes of Wakanda premiere on August 1.
via Collider