The deleted scenes and ideas we didn’t see on WandaVision

WandaVision is over, and it’s unlikely Marvel is going to serve up a trip that far out in a while. From the classic sitcom pastiches to the witch-on-witch battles to a hero who tortures a town full of innocent people for weeks, it was a wild ride.

And there were still things the team couldn’t fit in. “The scripts changed,” director Matt Shakman said on on Kevin Smith and Marc Bernardin’s Fatman Beyond podcast. “Things were constantly changing and getting re-broken … especially a lot of the real-world stuff and finale. There was a lot of experimentation going on and trying different things out. We also, at one point, had 10 episodes planned and ended up collapsing a couple just to make the rhythm feel a little bit better. And then, of course, once we wrapped in Atlanta, the pandemic hit and we ended up having months off and so, further changes happened during that. Ideas would come up [during post-production] and little changes would happen.”

Just what things were left on the cutting room floor? Well, how about a scene where Wanda’s kids have to contend with Agatha’s rabbit, Señor Scratchy?

In this cut sequence, Billy (Julian Hilliard) and Tommy (Jett Klyne) attempt to steal the Darkhold — that book of spells Agatha keeps referring to — from her basement. “The kids had seen it down there when they were being held hostage by Agatha,” Shakman explained. “They go down to get the book and they’re reaching for the book and the rabbit hops up in front of the book. And they’re like, ‘Oh it’s Señor Scratchy, he’s the best!’ And they reach over to pet him and he hisses and this whole American Werewolf in London transformation happens where the rabbit turns into this big demon. Into her familiar. And then a Goonies set piece ensues with all sorts of fun where they try to escape from the rabbit. We shot it, but didn’t finish all the VFX and stuff for it. It was a great sequence, it was super fun, everyone was great in it, but we ended up moving it aside because it was a huge detour in the middle of everything else we had going.”

This sequence would also have also featured Monica (Teyonah Parris), Darcy (Kat Dennings) and Ralph (Evan Peters), but it was dropped because the episode already “had so many different chess pieces” in play.

WandaVision creator Jac Schaeffer originally wanted a CSI parody in the show

And there were other ideas dropped long before that. For instance, originally creator Jac Schaeffer wanted to get a very different kind of TV parody in there. “In my pitch, the ‘rewind’ episode was a C.S.I. episode,” she told The New York Times. “I thought, how interesting to do sitcom, sitcom, sitcom, and then shatter that and be in a different genre.”

"But once we got in the writers’ room, we stayed with family sitcoms and sitcoms that were on the brighter, optimistic side of the spectrum because it is a fantasy. That meant things like All in the Family and Roseanne got shunted to the side. I had an episode that was The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and it was about Wanda’s work-life balance. Those are spectacular shows and say so much about our culture and ourselves. But we stayed in the zone of aspirational family sitcoms and that helped us find the focus of the show."

Maybe some of these ideas could be worked into a follow-up to WandaVision, but of course, Schaeffer isn’t revealing whether anything like that is in the cards. “That is one of the things that I super can’t talk about,” she said. “I will just reiterate what [the Marvel Studios president] Kevin Feige says: We set out to make a very complete and satisfying series. But with an entity like the M.C.U., you never know.”

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h/t SyFy Wire