The best thing to happen to Marvel TV in years is going to happen again. Marvel Studios announced on Monday that its 2026 series Wonder Man is getting a second season. That puts the show in a rarefied category of Marvel Cinematic Universe programs. Of the 17 MCU tie-in shows released since WandaVision kicked off the Disney Plus era of MCU TV in 2021, only Loki, What If…?, and Daredevil: Born Again have been renewed for follow-up seasons.
Series creators Destin Daniel Cretton (director of the upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day) and Andrew Guest (Community) are returning for the second season, along with series stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Aquaman) as struggling superpowered actor Simon Williams and Ben Kingsley as disgraced actor Trevor Slattery, aka The Mandarin, a role Kingsley has played across several projects, starting with Iron Man 3.
Even though Wonder Man‘s first season wrapped on an open-ended note, this is still surprising news for several reasons. First, most MCU shows don’t get follow-up seasons because their stories continue via other projects, for instance with WandaVision‘s sole season setting up Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Agatha All Along, and VisionQuest. Second, Wonder Man was a somewhat oddball project for Marvel Studios, a story only lightly tied to any other Marvel continuity (one of the goals of the “less homework, more personal stories” Marvel Spotlight banner), and focusing more on the mundane life of actors trying to get work in Hollywood, and forming a friendship in the process, than on fighting villains or saving lives.
And third, Wonder Man is both a satisfyingly fresh take on the Marvel setting, and a really great show, which suggests to cynics that it wasn’t likely to find an audience. The Hollywood Reporter says the show “racked up 618 million minutes of watch time, according to Nielsen, and landed in the metric tracking service’s top 10 original streaming series.” Oddly, in February, those same numbers were being called “weak” and a “viewership disappointment” as well as “a new low for Marvel on Disney+.”
Regardless of how you spin or interpret the viewership numbers, Marvel Studios apparently had confidence in Cretton and Guest’s vision for a continuing story, given the renewal. There were always signs that in spite of ongoing Marvel fatigue, the studio felt people would enjoy the show if they just tried it. Wonder Man is a Disney Plus exclusive, but the streamer posted the series premiere free on YouTube in hopes of luring viewers in.
The timeline for the second season of Wonder Man isn’t clear yet, and given Marvel Studios’ usual production timelines, it likely wouldn’t appear until 2028 at the earliest. Expect to see Cretton asked at least a few questions about the show in the near future when he’s on the press tour behind Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which opens on July 31, 2026.
