Avengers: Doomsday Reunites McKellen and Atwell from 2009 Prisoner Remake

Marvel’s upcoming superhero ensemble Avengers: Doomsday will bring together two performers who previously shared the screen in one of television’s most notorious remake misfires. Years before joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Sir Ian McKellen and Hayley Atwell starred opposite one another in AMC’s 2009 reimagining of Patrick McGoohan’s cult classic The Prisoner, a six-episode miniseries that failed to capture the surreal magic of its 1967 predecessor while earning scathing critical reviews.

The connection between these projects highlights the unpredictable trajectories of franchise actors, where even acclaimed performers navigate ambitious failures between blockbuster successes. As McKellen prepares to reprise his role as Magneto and Atwell returns as Peggy Carter, their previous collaboration in this forgotten adaptation serves as a fascinating prelude to their MCU reunion.

AMC’s Ambitious 2009 Reimagining

In 2009, the cable network AMC attempted to modernize one of science fiction television’s most enigmatic properties. The original series, created by and starring Patrick McGoohan, ran for just 17 episodes in 1967 but left an indelible mark on the genre with its story of an unnamed spy trapped in a mysterious coastal community called the Village.

The remake cast Jim Caviezel as Number Six, the imprisoned protagonist, while McKellen took on the role of Number Two, the Village’s sinister administrator. Atwell appeared as Number 4-15, a character named Lucy who shares a complicated romantic history with the protagonist. The supporting cast included Jamie Campbell Bower as Number Two’s son, adding familial dimensions absent from the source material.

Unlike the original, where McGoohan’s character resigned from intelligence work and was kidnapped to the Village, this version opened with Six awakening in the desert outside the community with no memory of his identity or past. The narrative structure diverged significantly from McGoohan’s vision, emphasizing themes of memory loss and conspiracy rather than psychological resistance against surveillance.

Key differences between the 1967 original and 2009 remake include:

• Episode count: The original ran 17 episodes; the remake lasted only 6
• Protagonist’s entry: The original featured a resignation and kidnapping; the remake opened with amnesia in the desert
• Identity: McGoohan’s Six retained his identity; Caviezel’s Six suffered memory suppression and knew nothing of the Village’s location
• Scope: The remake expanded Number Two’s domestic life, including a comatose wife and family relationships
• Community structure: Both versions featured the Village’s aggressive politeness and numerical designations replacing names, but the remake emphasized “dreamers” who conspired to uncover the truth

The Village itself functioned as a character in the drama, depicted as an aggressively polite community where residents abandoned their names in favor of numerical designations. Giant white spheres called Rovers patrolled the borders, preventing escape while maintaining an atmosphere of candy-colored surrealism.

Critical Backlash and Commercial Failure

Despite the pedigree of its cast and source material, the 2009 Prisoner collapsed under the weight of its own narrative ambition. The series garnered a devastating 17% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics finding the updated version confusing rather than intriguing.

Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker identified the fundamental flaw in the adaptation’s approach. Writer Bill Gallagher had dismissed the original’s themes regarding individual freedom and surveillance as outdated, intending instead to explore modern “obsession with self.” Tucker noted that this pivot resulted in storytelling that felt “self-absorbed to the point of incoherence,” suggesting the series disappeared into its own pretensions rather than engaging with meaningful ideas.

The Chicago Sun-Times delivered equally brutal assessments. Critic Paige Wiser compared viewing the six-hour experience to “tripping on LSD” or “conking myself on the head with a croquet mallet,” emphasizing the disorienting and unpleasant nature of the narrative experience. Despite the overall condemnation, reviewers uniformly praised McKellen’s performance as a highlight, acknowledging his ability to elevate material even when the surrounding production faltered.

The remake’s visual presentation earned acknowledgment for its aesthetic qualities, presenting the Village as a surreal environment policed by mysterious white balloons. Yet these stylistic choices could not overcome the convoluted plotting that replaced the original’s dream-like illogic with what many perceived as mere bafflement. The drastic reduction in episode count—from the original’s 17 installments to a mere six—did not prevent the narrative from feeling bloated according to critics. Where McGoohan’s version sustained its mysteries through concise storytelling, the compressed format of the remake somehow managed to feel both rushed and interminable, a six-hour investment that many reviewers suggested offered diminishing returns.

Unlike the 1967 version, which maintains active discussion and analysis decades later, the 2009 adaptation left virtually no cultural footprint, rarely referenced outside retrospective articles examining failed television experiments.

From Failed Experiment to Marvel Blockbuster

The upcoming Avengers: Doomsday marks a significant reunion for McKellen and Atwell, albeit under vastly different circumstances. McKellen will reprise his portrayal of Magneto, the mutant master of magnetism he played in Fox’s X-Men franchise, now integrated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Atwell returns to her established MCU character Peggy Carter, the Strategic Scientific Reserve officer and love interest to Captain America who previously headlined her own television series Agent Carter alongside appearances in multiple Marvel films.

The convergence represents a curious intersection of careers. While McKellen brings decades of acclaimed stage and screen work to his villainous turns, and Atwell has established herself as a franchise staple through her decade-long association with Captain America, their previous collaboration in The Prisoner remains largely forgotten by mainstream audiences. The 2009 series predated Atwell’s MCU debut by two years, and occurred during a period when McKellen balanced blockbuster fantasy work with prestige television projects.

Their casting in Avengers: Doomsday highlights the studio’s strategy of assembling veteran performers with established genre credentials. The film promises the largest superhero assembly to date, with the inclusion of legacy actors from previous Marvel-adjacent properties signaling ambitious cross-franchise storytelling that will likely reach far larger audiences than their 2009 television collaboration.

The Road Not Taken: Ridley Scott’s Unmade Vision

The 2009 version was not the only attempt to revive McGoohan’s creation. Director Ridley Scott previously contemplated his own cinematic reinterpretation of The Prisoner, though this project never materialized. This unmade adaptation joins a long list of stalled Prisoner revivals, suggesting the property’s specific alchemy resists easy translation to contemporary formats.

The original series derived its power from McGoohan’s singular vision and the cultural context of the late 1960s, when questions of individual liberty and institutional surveillance carried specific political weight. Subsequent attempts to update these concerns have struggled to find equivalent resonance. The 2009 remake’s focus on identity and memory loss, while theoretically relevant to modern anxieties, executed these themes through narrative convolution rather than psychological depth.

For McKellen and Atwell, The Prisoner represents a curious footnote—an ambitious failure between more successful franchise engagements. As they prepare to share screen time in one of the most anticipated blockbusters in recent memory, their previous collaboration serves as a reminder that even acclaimed performers navigate projects that fail to find their audience, only to find redemption in later, more successful endeavors.

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