This is a Bond Voyage review, so it’s classified as CONTAINS SPOILERS. Proceed with caution if you haven’t seen the movie. It’s probably fair to say we’d been expecting Mr Bond for much longer than anyone had planned and so, weighed down by those sharpened expectations and a surfeit of continuity, NO TIME TO DIE finally arrived in cinemas. Finally living the dream, albeit in surly fashion,…

Shallow, uninspired and indulgently inconsequential, WHAT IF…THOR WERE AN ONLY CHILD? takes our favourite Asgardian and amplifies the oafish arrogance we only briefly glimpsed in the movie to the point where you have to wonder how in the Nine Realms he’s still worthy of Mjolnir. When his parents take separate vacations, Thor decides to use his unsupervised time to head to Midgard to part-ay. P,…

Pinching off the MCU’s primary timeline before it even gets started, WHAT IF…KILLMONGER RESCUED TONY STARK eviscerates the story of 2008’s IRON MAN in favour of rewriting the plot of BLACK PANTHER. When Tony Stark’s convoy in Afghanistan is ambushed by the Ten Rings, the terrorists’ plans are foiled by a ruthless elite Navy Seal  Erik “Killmonger” Stevens. Impressed, Stark brings him inside…

It may not be the most pressing, or indeed grammatically structured question posed by Marvel’s animated AU series but WHAT IF… ZOMBIES?! might just be the most fun. Returning from the Quantum Realm (as seen in ANT-MAN AND THE WASP), an infected Janet Van Dyne attacks Hank Pym and together they bring the virus back, unleashing a zombie outbreak on an unsuspecting world. Things go from bad to…

WHAT IF…THE WORLD LOST ITS MIGHTIEST HEROES? is the first episode of the series so far to take its central question and wrap it not around a speculative exploration but around a central mystery instead. It’s a mystery that I managed to solve well ahead of its narrative reveal, though, because I suddenly remembered the long-running joke about how Thanos could have been defeated in AVENGERS:…

Where WHAT IF…CAPTAIN CARTER WERE THE FIRST AVENGER? may have changed up the shades but stuck to colouring inside the lines, WHAT IF…T’CHALLA BECAME A STAR-LORD? grabs a handful of crayons and gleefully scribbles all over the cosmic history of the MCU as we know it. Mistaking the Wakandan Vibranium lode as a sign of alien energy, the Ravagers abduct a young T’Challa instead of Peter Quill.…

With Marvel letting it all ride on their big multiverse bet, staked first in WANDAVISION and doubled-down on in LOKI, WHAT IF…? offers the MCU an irresistibly broad canvas on which to work. With canon now being a matter of corporate whim, who knows whether what we’re about to be offered will have ramifications beyond the animated world and into the MCU proper? Strange, then, that the series…

I’m not a fan of the growing trend for artificially prolonging a franchise by splitting the last instalment into two parts. There are reasons why trilogies evolved as a dominant storytelling structure rather than tetralogies, even though tetralogy sounds a lot cooler. The “Harry Potter” franchise just about got away with it (thanks to the source booking being huge) but “The Hunger Games” third…