James Spader returning as Ultron for Marvel's Vision series
This will be the first time the "Blacklist" star has played the evil android since "Avengers: Age of Ultron."
Let's hope Vision is ready to meet his maker. Entertainment Weekly has confirmed that James Spader will be returning as the voice of Ultron in Marvel Studios' upcoming series about Vision. The Hollywood Reporter was first to report the news.
As previously announced, the upcoming (still officially untitled) series will follow Vision after the events of the 2021 Disney+ series WandaVision. In that show, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) used magic to resurrect her robotic lover who had been killed by Thanos (Josh Brolin) in Avengers: Infinity War. Eventually Wanda had to give up the ghost, but in the meantime a new actual android body had been constructed for Vision, this one ghostly white instead of the character's traditional green-and-yellow color scheme. That white Vision will supposedly be at the center of the new show, with Paul Bettany reprising his role as the superhero android. Terry Matalas (Star Trek: Picard) will be showrunner.
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Now we know someone else will be reprising their role as well. So far, Spader's only appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been as the voice of Ultron in the 2015 superhero film Avengers: Age of Ultron. The character appeared in the animated series What If...?, but Spader did not voice him there. Those duties were instead handled by Ross Marquand, the talented voice actor who also filled in for Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull in Avengers: Endgame.
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In case it's been a while since you've revisited Age of Ultron, the titular robot was invented by Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) in an attempt to create "a suit of armor around the world" and protect the Earth from the threat posed by Thanos. Instead, Ultron came to despise humanity after absorbing all the knowledge of the internet (hard to blame him, in fairness) and tried to create an extinction event by levitating the capital city of Wanda's home country of Sokovia and cataclysmically crashing it to Earth.
It was Ultron himself who created the Vision's android body, originally as a perfect vessel for his own machine consciousness. But with the help of the Mind Stone, Vision took on an intelligence of his own, and helped the Avengers defeat Ultron. In the final minutes of Age of Ultron, Vision came face-to-face with Ultron's last body, and seemingly destroyed it — but that attack was just offscreen enough to leave the possibility that Ultron could have survived. Now it appears he has — or maybe the Ultron consciousness still lurks within Vision's programming somewhere.
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We'll find out for sure when the Vision series arrives on Disney+. In the meantime, another WandaVision sequel series (Agatha All Along) is arriving on Sept. 18.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.