Wait, Marvel nearly had Scarlet Witch kill WHO?!

Beau DeMayo, the ex-showrunner of X-Men ’97 who was fired by Disney after alleged sexual misconduct, now appears to have leaked the entire story outline for the original Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness on his X account.

The movie was once set to be directed by Scott Derrickson, who directed the original Doctor Strange, but he stepped down due to creative differences and the script was given a complete overhaul. Sam Raimi took over directing duties and the results were … fine. Raimi’s direction garnered praise from critics, but the story was considered weak. And Wanda Maximoff fans were furious that the character’s development from WandaVision was discarded, making Wanda/Scarlet Witch into a all-out villain rather than a tormented figure.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how Wanda specifically was treated in the original script, not least because WandaVision spinoff Agatha All Along is about to come out. Last week, scooper MyTimeToShineH posted what appeared to be a leak of the originally planned story, stating:

“The movie initially started with Wanda as a hero and not a villain. The original antagonist was Nightmare and Wanda was supposed to help Doctor Strange reach and defeat him.

However Feige and Waldron decided to change the storyline. Waldron who hadn’t watched WandaVision really wanted to make Wanda the antagonist. This led to a complete overhaul of the plot.”

This fits in with what Elizabeth Olsen, who played Wanda, said in a Vanity Fair interview back in 2023. “I said ‘Do you know what we’re doing in WandaVision? Have you seen it?’ And no, they had not seen it because it wasn’t finished yet.” In the eyes of many, that was what doomed Multiverse of Madness – the lack of any attempt to make Wanda’s story coherent.

Now, DeMayo has responded to the MyTimeToShineH leak by posting an entire breakdown of that discarded hero-Wanda storyline. First of all, he said, the events of WandaVision were tackled more directly, with Wanda was recovering from what happened in Westview. She would also be the mentor of America Chavez, rather than her pursuer, and would attempt to teach her to control her power by sharing her own experience.

Wanda would help Doctor Strange save the world from the villain Nightmare, but then an awful twist would come. She would try to find universe where she could be with her children—the ones who were taken from her at the end of WandaVision—and it would break her. She would try to flee into another universe, and in doing so, she would accidentally behead Doctor Strange’s fellow magic user, Wong. Wait, what?!

Wong is one of the most beloved characters in the entire MCU, and audiences would surely never forgive Wanda if she killed him, accidentally or not. Plus, what a missed opportunity! If Wong were killed at the end of Multiverse of Madness, we’d never have gotten his great turn in She-Hulk. Add that to the fact that Wong is one of the few Asian characters in Marvel movies, and his death is just a terrible, terrible idea.

According to DeMayo, the film would have ended on a cliffhanger. “Wanda is torn up by guilt in classic comic book fashion and keeps apologizing to Strange as she vanishes and leaves him with his dead friend’s body,” he explained.

Okay, so it’s a seemingly a better arc for Wanda (at least on paper), but if it came at the expense of Wong, I’m not sure I would have wanted it. And I think Wanda would have had a definite downturn in popularity if she’d killed someone everyone liked so much. The leak is an interesting glance into an alternate universe, but it’s better that way.