James Spader Sets Marvel Return as Ultron in ‘Vision’ Series

Ultron will return.

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James Spader is set to reprise his role of the villainous artificial intelligence from 2015’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron” for Marvel Studios’ upcoming Vision series with Paul Bettany.

Terry Matalas (“Star Trek: Picard”) will serve as executive producer and showrunner of the untitled series, which is scheduled to debut in 2026. Although Vision technically died in 2018’s “Avengers: Infinity War,” he was resurrected twice in the 2021’s series “WandaVision,” first as a spectral creation made (and then unmade) by magic, and again as a ghost white robot without any memories from his past.

It’ll prove troublesome for Vision when Ultron returns, since the characters have a longstanding history. Ultron created Vision’s original synthetic body as the permanent home for his AI, but the Avengers intercepted it and instead placed Tony Stark’s AI assistant J.A.R.V.I.S. inside, creating Vision. At the end of “Age of Ultron,” Vision confronts and, seemingly, destroys the final robot that contains Ultron’s consciousness, but the actual moment happens off-screen. The news of Spader’s return confirms that at least some version of Ultron survived.

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How Ultron will return for the series is unclear. For “Age of Ultron,” Spader performed the role via performance capture, but that process remains an expensive proposition for a TV series. Variety reported that the same approach for transforming Tatiana Maslany into the titular “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” cost Marvel roughly $25 million per episode.

The Vision series, which is looking to start production in England in 2025, is Marvel’s first new live-action show in nearly two years. Brad Winderbaum, Marvel’s head of streaming, television and animation, told Variety in May that the company started shifting to a more “traditional approach” to producing TV after the initial launch of its streaming content, which the studio made under a features model.

This will be Spader’s fifth TV series as a star, following “The Blacklist,” “The Office,” “Boston Legal” and “The Practice.” His film career spans from “Less Than Zero” and “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” to “Stargate,” “Secretary” and “Lincoln.”

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