Exclusive: Aubrey Plaza Getting Her Own Marvel Series As Death
We've learned Aubrey Plaza's Agatha: Coven of Chaos character, Death, will get her own Disney+ spinoff series.
She hasn’t even shown up on screen yet, and yet the former April Ludgate of Parks & Recreation is already expanding her Marvel kingdom. We already exclusively reported that Aubrey Plaza would be playing Death in the upcoming Marvel series Agatha: Coven of Chaos, and now our trusted and proven sources tell us she’ll be getting her own Disney+ spinoff series.
We don’t know much about the plot of Aubrey Plaza’s spinoff show, which shouldn’t be much of a surprise since the story of Agatha: Coven of Chaos is still being closely guarded by Marvel. There are some educated guesses we can make, however, based on canon of the MCU and the history of the character in the source material.
The character Aubrey Plaza will be playing, much like the one played by Kirby in Netflix‘s The Sandman, is the literal personification of death itself. In Marvel Comics, Death is at least a bit more villainous — or, at the very least, villain-adjacent — than the one Neil Gaiman dreamed up. While she’s usually depicted as an entity beyond considerations of morality, she does occasionally enjoy manipulating lesser beings, and one of her favorite playthings is Thanos.
In fact in Infinity Gauntlet, the comic book miniseries which inspired 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos wipes out half the universe not to solve the problem of overpopulation but as a gift to Death in hopes of wooing her. In the subsequent prequel series Thanos Rising, we learned that Death had been consciously manipulating Thanos since his childhood. Of course, in the MCU’s case, Aubrey Plaza didn’t show up in Infinity War or 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, but Thanos could still be the reason she’s showing up in Agatha: Coven of Chaos and her own spinoff show.
If there were a woman who was the personification of Death, and if one day she was suddenly overstuffed with the souls of half the universe — only to have all of those souls ripped away from her five years later — might that not have an adverse effect on her? It’s only speculation, of course, but it would make sense for such a character to be impacted by the blip. That could also be why she’s dealing with Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha and the other magic-wielders of the series.
Considerations of the source material aside, a solo Death series starring Aubrey Plaza could represent brand new ground for Disney+’s Marvel content. While Death is a character in Marvel Comics, the notion of her appearing as a protagonist is not something that’s been explored in the source material (at least not in Marvel’s source material).
Per KFTV, Agatha: Coven of Chaos wrapped filming last month. With Marvel choosing to spread its release dates further apart to combat over-saturation, we won’t be seeing Aubrey Plaza in that series until 2024. Considering that, Marvel’s usual lengthy post-production, and its relatively new prioritizing of combating superhero fatigue, we would guess 2025 would be the absolute earliest we’d see Plaza’s spinoff series.
