The Umbrella Academy boss is working toward an “endgame”

Marvel and DC aren’t the only game in town. Netflix has a completely different superhero series going: The Umbrella Academy, about a group of dysfunctional heroes trying to piece together their lives now that their crime-fighting days are in the past.

Of course, that’s hard for them to do when they seem to get mixed up in apocalypse after apocalypse. In the second season, the lot of them went back to Dallas in the 1960s, right around the time President Kennedy was assassinated. And that was the least of their worries. When they got back to their own time, they found that things had changed: their home is now occupied by an entirely different family of superheroes: the Sparrow Academy.

“[The Sparrow Academy] was something that [Umbrella Academy comic book author] Gerard [Way] and I had a similar idea on, and he wanted to incorporate it into the comics,” showrunner Steve Blackman told IGN. “I had a similar sense, there are 43 kids in this universe, special kids like our Umbrella Academy. Eventually, I wanted to meet more of them, and he also was planning to do something in the comic book. Our sort of minds melded and hence the Sparrow Academy.

"They’re an exciting group of seven other very special siblings that are very different from their own. I think the audience will get a real kick at seeing how they all interact with each other."

On the show, there are 43 kids in the world born all at once to mothers who weren’t pregnant moments before; they all have superheroes, but we’ve only met a small fraction of them. The Sparrow Academy will fill that out. There’s Sloan, Jayme, and of course Christopher, who is a telekinetic cube who floats around the room. They’re a wacky bunch.

“We get a couple of images of the Sparrows, there’s a great one of Jamie and Sloan,” Blackman said. “And we can see there’s a very different look to these Sparrows than the way our Umbrellas deal with stuff. They’re in uniforms, they’re very put together. You can see Luther and Victor and you can see they’re very different in terms of how the families dress, and how they’re put together, which obviously looks better than the other one. I think the fans are going to get a big kick of how different [the Sparrows] are. Without giving too much away, they’re both dysfunctional families in their own way is all I can say.”

How many seasons will The Umbrella Academy have?

The Umbrella Academy has packed a lot of wild adventure into two seasons already, and the third looks to up the ante. Just how long will this series last? Way has “10 volumes” of the comic planned, but the show is still finding its way.

“I have an end in my mind,” Blackman said. “Look, I’d love to say we have 10 seasons of this, but I don’t have 10 seasons in my mind, I know where I’m going. I’d like another season for sure. From the very early start of this, I had an idea where I wanted the TV show to end and I would love to have another season to get close to that ending. I already know what I want the endgame to be. That is obviously going to be different than where Gerard is going, because he has much more stuff he wants to do with these amazing characters that he created.”

The Umbrella Academy season 3 premieres on Netflix on June 22.

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