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

Ultron will come back.

James Spader will reprise his role as the evil artificial intelligence from the 2015 movie "Avengers: Infinity War." Age of Ultron" for Paul Bettany's upcoming Vision series from Marvel Studios.

Terry Matalas (a.k.a. "Star Trek: The untitled series, which is expected to premiere in 2026, will have Picard (“Picard”) serve as executive producer and showrunner. Even though Vision technically passed away in "Avengers: Infinity War: In the 2021 series "WandaVision," he was resurrected twice, once as a spectral creation created (and then destroyed) by magic and once as a ghost white robot without any recollection of his past.

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It'll demonstrate inconvenient for Vision when Ultron returns, since the characters have a longstanding history. Ultron intended for Vision's first synthetic body to serve as the AI's permanent home, but the Avengers snatched it up and inserted Tony Stark's AI assistant J.A.R.V.I.S. instead, resulting in Vision. Vision appears to confront and destroy the final robot that carries Ultron's consciousness at the end of "Age of Ultron," but the actual event takes place off-screen. That at least one version of Ultron survived is confirmed by the news of Spader's return.

It is unclear how Ultron will return to the series. Spader played the role using performance capture for "Age of Ultron," but that method is still expensive for a TV show. Assortment revealed that a similar methodology for changing Tatiana Maslany into the nominal "She-Mass: Each episode of "Attorney at Law" cost Marvel approximately $25 million.

Marvel's first new live-action show in nearly two years is slated to begin production in England in 2025 with the Vision series. Marvel's head of streaming, television, and animation, Brad Winderbaum, stated to Variety in May that the studio began moving toward a more "traditional approach" to producing television after the initial launch of its streaming content, which was produced under a features model.

This will be Spader's fifth television series as a star, following "The Boycott," "The Workplace," "Boston Lawful" and "The Training." From "Less Than Zero" and "Sex, Lies, and Videotape" to "Stargate," "Secretary," and "Lincoln," his filmography is extensive.