Marvel Shocker: Studio Realizes They Need To Make TV Shows For Television

How long do you reckon it should take for a studio to realize that the TV shows they line up for production should be produced like TV shows? In the case of Marvel Studios, the answer is 1,849 days. That’s how long it’s been since the rumors first emerged that the mammoth movie studio would change the game by putting major Marvel characters like Loki and Scarlet Witch in serialized stories designed for the small screen. Today, after five years and airing nine seasons of television (with at least four more completed and sitting in an edit bay somewhere), it looks like Marvel Studios is finally getting into the business of making television with a capital T and V.

This somehow shocking news comes as part of a rather explosive piece from The Hollywood Reporter, one that focuses on the news that the highly-anticipated Daredevil: Born Again — which had been filming for months before the dual WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes — has been more or less scrapped. Showrunners Chris Ord and Matt Corman, previously of the USA series Covert Affairs, have been “quietly let go” as head writers and instead made executive producers.

According to the report, the pause in production allowed Marvel execs — including Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige — to reach the conclusion that the show just wasn’t cutting it. As conceived by Ord and Corman, Daredevil: Born Again leaned more heavily on the legal procedural side and less on the superhero side; apparently Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) didn’t appear in uniform as Daredevil until Episode 4! And on top of that, the series wasn’t in line with its Netflix predecessor’s level of action and violence. Thus Daredevil: Born Again in its current incarnation was killed, only to be born again in a (predominantly) new series with new head writers and presumably, in a major change of pace, a showrunner — all TBD.

Yes, a showrunner — ! When Marvel Studios started producing TV, they left that key role out of their equation. Despite the role of showrunner being synonymous with the era of Peak TV (think Vince Gilligan and Breaking Bad, or Matt Weiner and Mad Men), Marvel Studios’ shows would be run by film executives. Head writers would had control over to directors, and “fix it in post” — a phrase most often heard regarding movies — would become a common phrase on Marvel TV sets. All of this led to some territorial conflicts between high-ranking creatives, especially as teams set out to film entire seasons of television all at once.

Oh yeah — the whole pitch and pilot process that has defined television production for roughly 70 years was tossed out, too! This Marvel method resulted in exorbitant budgets, sometimes to the tune of $211 million. That’s how much Secret Invasion — Marvel’s worst-performing series critically and one of its worst commercially — cost. The report also points out that Secret Invasion was the site of a major battle between creative forces that saw major turnover behind the scenes. Matters got so out of hand, an insider told THR, that even the Marvel exec assigned to oversee production on Secret Invasion was reassigned and is expected to leave Marvel when his contract is up.

All of this is because Marvel Studios wanted to make TV, but they seemed to want to make shows that were more than TV — as if TV still had the low-budget, low-brow stigma it did in the 20th century. What’s more than TV? Movies — and Marvel Studios knew how to make movies! All of that undermined what makes TV and movies inherently different, especially from a production standpoint.

Marvel actually got to see what they were missing out on by nixing the showrunner role and handing control to movie execs during post-production on She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. Jessica Gao developed the show and ran the writers’ room and, as per usual with Marvel shows, handed control over to director Kat Coiro when the Tatiana Maslany-led series got in front of cameras. But due to the restrictions of producing a show during COVID, Gao was brought back on board to oversee post-production — kinda like what a showrunner does on pretty much every other TV show. This gave She-Hulk a “creative throughline,” in the eyes of Marvel brass, and it resulted in — despite what haters want you to think — a well-received show that was more watched than Moon Knight and Hawkeye. Sidenote: Yes, She-Hulk had more episodes, but those episodes were half as long as episodes of Moon Knight and Hawkeye. Ratings are measured in minutes, so the math still maths.

When looking to the future of Marvel TV, the report says that Marvel Studios is looking to not only hire showrunners for its future shows, but they will also instate a pilot process for new series and develop shows to run for multiple seasons as opposed to the limited series model they’ve been using so far. So… television. While this is a ground-level redo of the MCU’s TV production, it’s wild how unsurprising all of this is. None of these ideas are radical! A TV show focusing on characters that you want to see in episode after episode? Episodes written with a cohesive creative vision that carries through from conception to release? Yeah, that’s television, baby.

Not only is it television. It’s comics. The creative similarities between superhero comics and television far outnumber those between superhero comics and movies. These characters have existed in their original forms for, in some cases, 80 years and persist via regular episodic adventures. That’s television! The only edge that movies have had over television is in regard to budget. In order to bring superheroes with extravagant powers like Scarlet Witch or Vision or Loki or She-Hulk to television, you need the money for visual effects. Prior to the streaming boom, TV shows did not have that budget (see: the number of times the CW’s Arrow-verse heroes had epic battles in empty warehouses).

Marvel Studios and Disney, however, had the budget to burn and put that oomph into their TV shows — and it has paid off, at least where visuals are concerned (well… sorta). But instead of taking a production formula that wasn’t broke and putting Scrooge McDuck’s bank account to work, Marvel broke that formula apart like an earthquake and watched a whole lot of coins disappear into the abyss.

Mercifully, all of that seems to be changing now — and to be fair, it’s not like the nine seasons of TV we’ve gotten so far have been bad. WandaVision, What If…?, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, and Moon Knight all earned Creative Arts Emmy nominations; What If…? and Moon Knight each won once, and WandaVision earned three trophies. But beyond accolades, the Marvel shows have given us major memes (“Agatha All Along” and Madisynn) and introduced major players into the MCU (Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Contessa de Fontaine, Hailee Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop, and Iman Vellani’s Ms. Marvel).

Anecdotally, I’d say that audiences have had fun with most of these shows — but the numbers show that audiences have been dwindling rapidly. And after all of the trouble on Secret Invasion, and once it was proven without a shadow of a doubt that all that trouble was very much not worth it, it’s no wonder that Marvel took a long hard look at themselves. I do kinda love the symmetry of Marvel entering its self-hatred/self-improvement era with Daredevil, the hero most known for his crippling depression and epic bad decisions.

This is a lot to take in, and these are a lot of changes, but all of this bodes well for Marvel Studios and the future of the MCU on TV. Even if it means more shows are scrapped and/or overhauled and/or delayed, at least we can rest assured that Marvel knows they goofed up and they have the right ideas regarding how to fix things. It took five years, but Marvel Studios now realizes they are making television shows. Now, uh, let’s hope we don’t have to wait another 1,849 days just to see one of those series.