Marvel’s ‘Eyes Of Wakanda’ Showrunner Teases Animated ‘Black Panther’ Spin-Off: “You Get Wakanda-Grade James Bond, And Sometimes A Jane Bond, With The Backdrop Of All The Awesomeness That Is Wakanda”

While Marvel Studios has maintained near-complete radio silence on their upcoming Eyes of Wakanda animated series, details ranging from a James Bond-esque direction to an anthology-style presentation are now making their way public courtesy of showrunner Todd Harris, who has begun making the press tour rounds ahead of the Black Panther spin-off’s August release date.

RELATED RUMOR: Marvel Cinematic Universe To Introduce A Female Iron Fist In Upcoming ‘Eyes Of Wakanda’ Animated Series
Officially confirmed as one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s next television entries in December 2023, the year-and-a-half since then have seen Disney release the bare minimum amount of details regarding the series’ production, with previously released information being limited to its cast list (which features Canadian fashion model Winniw Harlow and The CW’s Black Lightning lead Cress Williams in starring roles), a very, very, very brief shot of its visuals via a 2024 D23 Expo sizzle reel, and the tease that its story would center on the history of Wakanda and the warriors who fought to keep the fictional African nation’s technological prowess from being discovered and subsequently exploited.
“Throughout Wakandan history, brave warriors have been tasked to travel the world retrieving dangerous vibranium artifacts,” read the series’ official logline at the time of its announcement, as provided by Marvel Studios to the press. “This is their story.”

However, thanks to the series’ rapidly approaching release date, the aforementioned Harris has been given the green-light to open up about just what viewers can expect from his historical Wakanda adventure.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, the showrunner, who prior to being tapped to lead Eyes of Wakanda served as a storyboard artist on a number of MCU productions including the Black Panther duology, Avengers: Infinity War, and the Hawkeye TV series, said that the core goal of his series was to explore “the interconnectivity of Marvel with the interconnectivity of history along with the interconnectivity of the human story.”
“I really liked the idea of everyone’s view of history,” explained Harris. “The story starts off during the end of the Western Bronze Age, and that spark sets off this giant spy-espionage story that reverberates through time…. You get Wakanda-grade James Bond, and sometimes a Jane Bond, with the backdrop of all the awesomeness that is Wakanda.”

From there, Harris turned his attentions to a preview image, as exclusively provided by Marvel Studios to EW, depicting a fleet of Wakandan boats seemingly preparing to make landfall under the orders of the series’ main characters.
[Editor’s Note: We’d love to share the preview image here, but when it comes to these ‘exclusive first looks’, both Disney and news outlets like to get DMCA happy, so for now we’ll just point you to EW’s article, where all the relevant images can be found.]
Admitting that he couldn’t speak too much about what specifically was going on in the image – “We try to mirror the actual spirit of the nation of Wakanda by keeping as many secrets as possible,” he joked to the outlet’s Nick Romano – the showrunner did confirm that Eyes of Wakanda would focus on the country’s own CIA-styled black ops division know as the Hatut Zaraze (the ‘Dogs of War’) and the various operations they undertook to safeguard their supply of Vibranium.
“When an inciting incident releases some of these things into the wild, they’ve got to, in a very hush hush kind of way, make sure that these things don’t turn into a bigger problem,” teased Harris. “We saw what happened when one disc got into the hands of one Super Soldier [a reference to Nick Fury’s providing Steve Rogers a flash drive detailing the extent of S.H.I.E.L.D’s corruption in Captain America: The Winter Soldier] — it changed the course of the world.”

Moving to the series’ overall creative direction, Harris described Eyes of Wakanda as “anthology adjacent”, with each episode being set at different eras throughout history.
“Same country, two different worlds,” he said in reference to the ‘past’ and the ‘present’. “As we make our touchstones through time, we get to see that kind of evolution.”
Yet, despite its time-travelling structure, Harris clarified to his host that the series was less about the historical Wakanda and more focused on exploring the country’s principoles.
“We have characters that are very important in the show, but it also examines what kind of person Wakanda makes,” he detailed. “A 10,000-year-old society. What kind of fortitude, what kind of lack of temptation to over expand? All these different things to keep things from imploding, all these different things that have been the detriment to a lot of history…how did they avoid that and what kind of person does that make? What kind of rock-solid principles keeps them on the straight and narrow that balance that’s so hard for everyone alive?”

Pressed on the fact that the ‘main characters’ seen in the series’ preview image all appear to hail from different nations – their appearances range from ‘Nordic viking’, to ‘Middle Eastern assassin’, to ‘Japanese samurai’, to ‘Hindu warrior ‘ – Harris asserted, “We’re all in this together and history has proven that”
“We like to think there are silos of people in history, but there’s the Fertile Crescent; the Mediterranean; the intersections between Eurasia, Asia, north Africa, and all the different cultures that all created this mesh,” he added, “That’s what that imagery is supposed to invoke: It’s not a rare circumstance that we’re all here again together.”
In this sense, Harris affirmed that while the series was Wakanda-centric, he still considered it to be “a globe-trotting adventure”.
“There’s a couple of surprises because part of the opportunity here is to sprinkle little pieces of history and go, ‘I didn’t know that happened,'” he concluded. “Part of it is holding a mirror up to some historical theories and some historical facts and some historical preconceived notions.”

At current, Marvel’s Eyes of Wakanda is set to set sail around the Disney Plus-globe on August 6th.
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