Wonder Man, the Marvel Disney Plus series that ended up with a 91% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and became one of the most warmly received MCU shows in years, nearly never existed.
It bombed its test screenings, was pulled off Marvel’s development board entirely at one point, and its showrunner spent months holding on and hoping the project would survive.
The full story came out in a recent appearance by showrunner Andrew Guest on The Ringer’s The Watch podcast, and it is a remarkable behind-the-scenes account of how one of Disney Plus’s best recent Marvel shows came within inches of being killed before it ever reached an audience.
What Happened In The Test Screenings?
The problems started early. When Wonder Man’s first two episodes were screened in front of a test audience, the reaction was poor, not because the show was bad, but because audiences were confused by what they were watching.
“When we tested the first two episodes, which we did in front of an audience, and it didn’t test all that great because a lot of people were confused by the show,” Guest explained on the podcast.
His immediate assumption was that Marvel would now demand significant creative changes. “I was like, okay, now they’re going to say, ‘Let’s change it.'”
It stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Simon Williams, an aspiring Hollywood actor who becomes a superhero, alongside Ben Kingsley returning as Trevor Slattery, the actor best known for impersonating the villain Mandarin in Iron Man 3.
The show operates as a comedic industry satire as much as a superhero story, with the two actors pursuing roles in a fictional MCU film being directed within the show itself.
It is layered, self-aware, and genuinely different from anything Marvel had produced before. Test audiences encountering it cold, with no context for what it was trying to do, were understandably disoriented.
Marvel’s response was not what Guest expected. Instead of ordering a creative overhaul, the studio told him: “No, we have to market this differently.”
The show itself would remain intact. The problem was packaging, not content.
The Moment It Was Pulled From The Board
The test screening issues were just one part of the challenge. The larger threat came from Marvel’s broader strategic reckoning with its Disney Plus output.
During the writing period for Wonder Man, Marvel was reevaluating its entire approach to streaming television, a tumultuous, strike-affected period during which projects were being scrutinized, restructured, or killed.
Guest described Wonder Man as “one of the last projects in the door of the previous iteration of the Marvel Disney Plus experiment, where they were saying yes to many things.”
That era of blanket greenlit had come to an abrupt end.
“There was a period during our writing where many things at Marvel were looked at sort of through a new critical lens of what we can pare down,” Guest said.
“And we were definitely one of those things that was taken off their board for a moment there.”
The project was not just in jeopardy, it was briefly, officially dead. “The producers who were part of our project fought like hell to convince people this is something worth continuing with.”
It had also previously been reported that Marvel considered canceling Wonder Man as a tax write-off during the writers’ strike, the same approach Warner Bros. used when it killed the completed Batgirl film in 2022.
The show was saved from that outcome when Marvel’s producers went to bat for it.
Guest’s summary of surviving all of it: “I just held on and hoped and prayed.”
What Is Wonder Man?
For readers unfamiliar with the show, some context helps explain why it became the Marvel project worth fighting for.
Simon Williams, Wonder Man, is a minor character in the original Marvel comics, a former industrialist turned superhero with ionic energy powers.
In the MCU version, he is reimagined as a struggling actor in Hollywood, giving the show room to satirize the film industry, celebrity culture, and the superhero genre itself from the inside.
The casting of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, known for Watchmen, Candyman, and Aquaman, was widely praised.
Ben Kingsley’s return as the hapless Trevor Slattery provided genuine comedic depth, and the two leads developed chemistry that critics consistently highlighted.
The show ran eight episodes on Disney Plus in January 2026 and landed with a response that bore no resemblance to those early test screenings.
Critics praised its originality, its humor, and its willingness to do something genuinely different within the MCU framework.
Audiences who found it agreed. The 91% Rotten Tomatoes score placed it among the best-reviewed Marvel streaming projects ever made.
Why This Story Matters Beyond One Show
The Wonder Man near-cancellation is a window into just how chaotic Marvel’s Disney Plus strategy became in the years following the initial wave of WandaVision, Loki, and Hawkeye.
What began as a mandate to produce as much content as possible, as quickly as possible, to stock the new Disney Plus service and keep subscribers engaged, eventually collapsed under its own weight.
Shows were greenlit without the development time that television typically requires.
Some were critically dismissed. Audience fatigue set in. The model that worked for blockbuster films did not translate cleanly to episodic streaming television, and Marvel spent several years, and several hundred million dollars, learning that lesson in public.
Wonder Man arrived late in that process and almost didn’t survive the correction.
The fact that it did, and that it turned out to be exactly the kind of original, confident creative work that Marvel’s Disney Plus slate needed more of, makes Guest’s account of its survival feel like more than just a behind-the-scenes anecdote.
It is a case study in what gets lost when studios are too quick to cut, and what can be found when someone fights for the work.
Guest put it plainly: “Several moments where we almost didn’t survive, I can tell you.”
They survived. The show is now one of the best things on Disney Plus. Sometimes the test audiences are wrong.
