The history of unmade projects may be one of the most fascinating pieces of the Hollywood, especially in the case of superhero properties. Well before the 2000s kicked off the golden age of comic book movies, dozens of projects never got off the ground despite having completed scripts or died their deaths at various points in production. Even in its relatively short history, Marvel Studios is no stranger to seeing projects fall by the wayside. Brian K. Vaughan and Drew Pearce‘s Runaways was pushed aside for The Avengers; after being announced in 2014, Inhumans was tossed aside; recently, Avengers: The Kang Dynasty was scrapped after the studio parted ways with the film’s star, Jonathan Majors.
Of course, not making it into theaters isn’t always a death blow. The characters who would have starred in Runaways and Inhumans made their way to television, though hey did so without the involvement of Marvel Studios. The moral of the story is that despite a sometimes strong public sentiment to the contrary, not every project that is dreamed up makes its way to an audience. Marvel’s head of streaming, television and animation, Brad Winderbaum, recently made it clear that moving forward the studio will be “developing more than we make” and that the days of meeting a release date come “hell or high water” are a thing of the past. In short, projects in development at Marvel Studios have never had a more uncertain road to screens big or small than they do now.
Perhaps no project serves as a better example of the tenuous trek from script to screen than Young Avengers. In development since at least Summer 2021, the project has been rumored to both a streaming series and a film and be ready to head into production on multiple occasions over the years. However, despite an outright tease in The Marvels and the arrival of one of the team’s central figures in Agatha All Along, Marvel Studios has yet to officially acknowledge a Young Avengers project is in the works. Now we may know why.
As part of the studio’s recent changes to its way of doing business behind the scenes, projects further out on the release schedule were back burnered in mid-2023 following a pair of strikes. With the streaming and theatrical slates now set through 2025, the studio has slowly begun to turn its attention to the future and it seems the Young Avengers project has found its way into the cross hairs of the Marvel Parliament again…sort of.
According to reliable Marvel insider Daniel Richtman, Marvel has chosen to develop the project as a Disney Plus streaming series rather than a film and is now searching for a showrunner. However, in a move that is sure to churn up controversy among fans, the studio has chosen to rebrand the project as Champions, according to another social media scooper, Apocalypse Horseman.
Despite the vitriol it’s sure to inspire, the name change is not without comic book inspiration. Originally devised in 1975 as a title featuring a team of heroes that included Black Widow, Hercules and Ghost Rider, the title was repurposed in 2016 for an all-new, all-different team created by Mark Waid and Humberto Ramos. The modern team was founded by young heroes following Civil War II and an ideological dispute with the Avengers.
As explained by Marvel Comics editor Tom Breevort, the team aspired to “reclaim and redefine in a classic sense what being a superhero should mean.” Champions assembled teen heroes Ms. Marvel, Miles Morales, Sam Alexander, Amadeus Cho, a time-displaced Cyclops and the synthezoid Viv Vision. As is the case with all Marvel Comics teams, the Champions roster rotated members in and out, including, among othes, Riri Williams and Joaquin Torres.
According to Richtman, part of the reason the studio chose to rebrand the project as Champions was because with its arrival on D+ still years away, many of the expected members of the team will no longer fit the bill of ‘young” Avengers. While there’s obviously no confirmed cast for the series, Iman Vellani (22 years old) and Hailee Steinfeld (27 years old) seem likely to lead the project alongside Dominique Thorne (27 years old), Kathryn Newton (27 years old), Elijah Richardson (25 years old), Joe Locke (21 years old) and Xochitl Gomez (18 years old). Additionally, Logan Kim (17 years old), who will portray Amadeus Cho in Captain America: Brave New World, the actor yet to be cast as Tommy Shepherd and, possibly, an actress yet to be cast as Viv Vision could all find their way onto the titular team as well.
