Anomaly Pictures co-founders Michael Waldron and Adam Fasullo use a movie reference to describe their first meeting, which is perfect because the Marvel and “Ricky and Morty” writer and former Intrepid Pictures exec, respectively, immediately bonded over their shared love of film and TV.
“Genuinely, I tell people, it’s the moment in ‘Step Brothers’ when they become best friends,” Fasullo told TheWrap of his and Waldron’s first meeting, which was over a spec script Waldron had written called “Heels.” While that show wouldn’t get off the ground for a few years, Waldron and Fasullo stayed close and daydreamed of one day running their own production company.
After Waldron hit a hot streak with Marvel Studios, writing and producing the hit series “Loki” before being enlisted to write the film sequel “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and “Avengers: Secret Wars,” the opportunity finally came for him to launch his own banner. And he knew just who to call.
Waldron struck a deal with Disney as part of his writing duties on the next “Avengers” films, which included launching his own production company with 20th Television. This is where Anomaly Pictures – and “Chad Powers” – was born.
Launching on Hulu this week, “Chad Powers” is inspired by an ESPN sketch starring Eli Manning that saw the NFL legend donning prosthetics to go undercover to play for a different team. For the Hulu series, Glen Powell takes on the lead role of a disgraced former NFL player who wears a fake nose and teeth to score a walk-on role on a fictional college football team.
The show came together quickly and Waldron – who co-wrote the first episode with Powell – had to work fast to fit “Chad Powers” into Powell’s increasingly busy schedule. But he and Fasullo say the fact that the central conceit of the series sounds “stupid” is precisely the kind of project they want to make at Anomaly going forward.
“When I went in to pitch on ‘Loki,’ my pitch was like, ‘All right, well, Loki traveling through time. What if this was great? What if this is the best show on TV?’ I think that ethos of, ‘Well, what if it was really good?’ is something we want to try to fit in everything we do,” he said. “That’s why ‘Chad Powers’ is the perfect thing out the gate for the company. A show about the Eli Manning sketch where he dresses up in prosthetics. What if that was the best comedy on television? That challenge is really exciting to me.”
Read on for more insight into how Waldron and Fasullo are building out Anomaly Pictures, how they got “Chad Powers” off the ground so quickly and how Waldron fit this Hulu comedy series into his busy Marvel schedule writing on the next two “Avengers” movies.
How did you guys first meet and what made you want to go into business with one another?
Adam Fasullo: Michael wrote a spec pilot that was forwarded to me by a friend of mine and he contextualized it as, “I do not rep this person. I just think you guys will get along.” I had just recently been promoted off of my boss’ desk at the newly formed Paramount Television, and I was looking to get some points on the board. This spec was about the lives of semi-professional wrestlers in Georgia and that pilot was “Heels,” and I just recognized that that was a hole that needed to be filled in the marketplace in terms of a world to explore for television.
Genuinely, I tell people, it’s the moment in “Step Brothers” when they become best friends. We’re movie and television obsessives, we’re almost precisely the same age and we both love college football. I went to the University of Pittsburgh. Michael went to Georgia. I was a psycho about Pitt football, which is a really terrible place to have to live in all the time. But nobody out here in LA really cares about college football, unless you went to Michigan or USC. That was really the thing that caused us to hit it off.
We sold “Heels” to Starz, but it was put on the shelf. We kind of went our separate ways. After “The Haunting of Hill House,” I went to go work with Mike Flanagan at Netflix. Michael then went to “Rick and Morty” as a writer and that gave him the opportunity to do “Loki.” And we always talked about starting a production company, assuming it was a faraway dream that was simply an impossibility.
Michael Waldron: We didn’t get the show made, but we did become best pals. So fast forward to when I took the job of what at the time was just writing “Avengers 6,” “Avengers: Secret Wars,” there was an opportunity, as I made a new deal with Disney, to also start my own company and have a TV deal inside of 20th Century. So Adam and I said, “All right, we want to do this for real.” And as we were making that deal, I knew Glen Powell and we got the call from CAA that was like, “Hey, Omaha Productions is looking to do this ‘Chad Powers’ thing, would you be interested in doing it?” And me, Glen and Adam sort of all teamed up, kind of instantly started trying to figure that out.
How did you know Glen?
Waldron: I got to know Glen on a general meeting. I remember I saw him in “Everybody Wants Some!!!” and I was like, “This is the next guy.” I chased him down and met him and made him be my friend, and always knew I wanted to work with him. So it was no surprise to us as we were putting “Chad” together, that Glen’s career was taking off. It was certainly a benefit to have him and to have a show that was within the Disney ecosystem. Then there’s a lot of synergy with all of ESPN and personalities and all the college football stuff there.
With “Chad Powers,” having a project that you can build your company around and say, “We’re going to get this thing made” is incredibly valuable. We said, “We’re going to make this show. It’s going to be incredible, and it’s going to represent everything we want to do as a company. It’s going to have a huge star at the center of it. It’s going to be unexpected, fun, have a lot of heart, and hopefully be a big hit.” That’s the one box we’ve got left to check, but we’re certainly proud of it.
And then the other thing is, it was a really unique hybrid deal. It was half 20th and it’s half Marvel. I’ve been incredibly lucky to work with Marvel Studios and those guys over there for many years now, and they’ve been so supportive of me, not just in the stuff I want to do over there, but me becoming a director in my own right and making stuff like “Chad Powers” where maybe it doesn’t feature somebody traveling from one universe to another, but it still has somebody putting on a mask.
So from my vantage point, it’s like, “OK, great. You’re gonna make the show. ESPN is involved. Peyton and Eli Manning are involved. Glen Powell is involved, and he’s now the most in-demand superstar.” How do you avoid too many cooks without ego getting in the way?
Fasullo: This is just me complimenting Michael and Glen: They’re an incredible creative force just in their own right together. And so much of this is because, like how Michael and I met, we kind of had the same experience with Glen. We’re all the exact same age. Same movie references. We all have the same kind of extraordinary psychotic level of ambition. We all came out here to do this for the rest of our lives. And we all love college football. It was truly one of those extraordinary kismet events, of us all coming together at the same time. Michael and Glen wrote the hell out of that pilot together. Then just to really go out of our way to give the Mannings’ company, Omaha Productions, credit, they really let us make the show we wanted to make. It was always, “Whatever you guys think is best for the character and for the story, we will support you 100%.” That is very unlike most producing rights holders.
This happened really fast. How did you pull it together to make it fit with Glen’s increasingly busy schedule?
Waldron: We had the strike in there as well. That was certainly a challenging part of the first year of our company, we couldn’t do anything. But when the strike ended we had talked about the thing enough that we were able to write it pretty quickly, and we wrote something that we were really proud of. Then “Anyone but You” came out and Glen’s life transformed. He just became that much more the star that we always knew he was going to be. It was no surprise to us that we were suddenly contending with him having huge filmmakers wanting him, and we just figured it out. That meant we had to go into production on a pretty accelerated timetable last fall. I brought my whole writing staff to Atlanta. But the stress of that kind of timetable is a lot easier to handle if your producing partner and the person you’re in business with is your best pal. It’s like, we can ultimately be laughing and look at each other and say, “Wow, this is really crazy. Are we gonna die?” Which is a good thing to be able to do.
Adam, were you as confident, or were you sweating a little bit as it was happening so fast?
Fasullo: I was incredibly confident that I knew if we could get the green light that we would deliver, because I know how good Michael is as a writer, and I know how good he is under stress.
Waldron: It’s like Calvin says, “I work better under pressure,” and Hobbs says, “You only work under pressure.” That is the world that I came up in. I’d always rather have more time, but last summer was crazy and everybody banded together, including my family. We were making a show that’s about kind of a scrappy underdog team trying to do the impossible. It was actually easy to go to work every day and be like, “Yeah, that’s us.”
So due to Glen’s schedule is that why the season is only six episodes?
Waldron: No. It was always a conversation of, are we going to do six or are we going to do eight? “Loki” was only six episodes, and I tend to think, when you have Glen Powell on TV, it’s not really a TV show. It’s like with “Loki” and “WandaVision,” certainly the early Marvel shows, the feeling was that you felt like you were stealing something. Like, “I shouldn’t be watching Elizabeth Olsen on a TV show.” I think we tried to harness a little bit of that feeling with this show. So in that sense, six, while helpful for our schedule, actually was nice, because I think it just makes it feel like more of an event, and it just forces accelerated storytelling. That does go back to the Harmon days of “Rick and Morty,” where it’s like, “We’ve got a great sci-fi conceit for the whole episode,” and Dan would be like, “No, you have your act one break. Now we need three more movie-worthy sci-fi conceits to get us through the rest of this journey.” Accelerated storytelling in TV is always a good thing, I think.
Fasullo: And it’s a ticking clock premise. This can only go so far for so long. If we’re lucky enough to make Season 2 and 3, our ambitions are to be one season of football each time out.
Michael, what has your time at Marvel taught you? Was there anything you applied to this as you were producing your own show?
Waldron: If you’re lucky enough to work at Marvel for as long as I have, just the sheer amount of talented, successful, brilliant people that come through those doors is wild. I got to sit next to Sam Raimi for basically two years on “Doctor Strange 2.” That was my film school, and I learned everything about directing from him. The other thing about Marvel is Kevin is the most successful producer of all time, and everybody who works under him, you’re all working together toward the making of these gargantuan projects. So I learned a lot about producing from the great producers over there, Stephen Broussard, Jonathan Schwartz, the folks who are under Kevin.
Then maybe the most important thing you learn at Marvel is just how to work with huge movie stars. On “Loki,” I went from a guy with not a ton of experience to suddenly I’m sitting with Tom Hiddleston figuring out this character, and on “Doctor Strange” working with Benedict Cumberbatch, Lizzie Olson, Rachel McAdams. You’re developing an acumen and a language with actors that is incredibly valuable as a filmmaker and a creator, and that gives you the confidence, and maybe more importantly, gives the studio and the network confidence that you can handle a production with the most ascendant movie star out there at the center of it. In some ways, everything’s easy after after working at Marvel. Not even because it’s hard, but just because it’s so big and because the pressure is so high.
So you’re writing on both “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Avengers: Secret Wars?”
Waldron: Yes, I am. I’ve been back and forth from London, helping that team out while in post on “Chad Powers.” And again, that’s only possible if you have a partnership like this, if I can look at my producing partner and say, “All right, I have to disappear into Marvel world and I trust your creative instincts enough to speak for the show.” Adam and I have to be a hivemind in many ways.
Were you working on “Avengers: Kang Dynasty” at all before that became “Avengers: Doomsday?”
Waldron: “Kang Dynasty” was Jeff Loveness, my friend, who was writing that with Destin Daniel Cretton, who’s now doing “Spider Man: Brand New Day.” Because I was writing the movie after that but there wasn’t a filmmaker attached yet, I was just involved in all those conversations. When that movie went away, I was working on what would become “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Secret Wars” for a time, and then they brought in the Russos and Steve McFeely right at the time we were going to make “Chad Powers.” As those guys got in and wrapped their hands around what these movies were going to be, I was off doing this insane thing, and when I finished, there was an opportunity for me to to come back in and get to know Joe and Anthony and Steve and really just help however I could. That’s what I’m trying to do is just support them.
What’s next for Anomaly? What kind of projects are you looking at and what’s your vision for the company going forward? And Michael, do you want to write and direct a lot of them?
Waldron: The immediate is we hope to make more “Chad Powers.” Hopefully there’s a great response, and we get to finish this story because we think there’s a lot to do there. Then I do think that it’s me writing and directing, directing a lot more of what I write. I directed the finale of “Chad Powers” this season. If we do another season, I’ll probably direct even more. Then on the feature side, it’d be great to direct something for Marvel eventually. We have other stuff that we’re developing independently. I’m working on an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s “Libra” to direct, which is kind of as far afield from the other stuff we’ve done as you can imagine. We’re trying to never get pigeonholed into one thing.
The story that I always tell is when I went in to pitch on “Loki,” my pitch was like, “All right, well, Loki traveling through time. What if this was great? What if this is the best show on TV?” I think that ethos of, “Well, what if it was really good?” is something we want to try to fit in everything we do. That’s why “Chad Powers” is the perfect thing out the gate for the company. A show about the Eli Manning sketch where he dresses up in prosthetics. What if that was the best comedy on television? That challenge is really exciting to me.
Fasullo: Anything we have that’s in development that unfortunately has yet to be announced, has a bit of that. “What if it was good?” or “What if we took an idea that’s on its face either presents as objectively stupid or objectively uninteresting?” Effectively, we’ve seen this before, and we turn it on its head and we give you the best possible version, because we’ve iterated and iterated and iterated on what it can possibly be over and over again, because Michael and I see everything, watch everything, read everything. And so we have an incredibly high bar for material, and we have an incredibly high bar specifically for ourselves and our own work ethic, and so generally, we’re not going to do anything that we’re both not immediately leaping at.
Waldron: More importantly, I have a very low threshold for boredom. I just am so easily bored.
One final, really stupid question, because you’re into stupid things. “Mrs. Doubtfire” is not available on 4K Blu-ray, and yet it’s on a billboard in this show. Do you know something that we don’t?
Fasullo: I’m so glad you brought this up. So originally it was going to be a “Mrs. Doubtfire” podcast, and we’re like, “It just doesn’t feel urgent enough, it doesn’t feel like it has enough of a reason to exist.” I’m a 4K Blu-ray, Criterion, Steelbook freak. So this is part of my ploy, basically, to force the Walt Disney Company’s hand to get a 4K Blu-ray of Mrs. Doubtfire into production. They effectively said, “That’s great. That takes years and years of restoration.” But this is my hope here is that people will see that and start demanding it, and there’ll be a groundswell.
Waldron: This is the thing Adam cared about the most in the entire project.
