OK, hopefully, you’ve just read our article on Marvel’s “Daredevil: Born Again,” which is going through a massive creative reboot/rethink/overhaul, etc., because Kevin Feige and the Marvel powers that be have decided the show—which was supposed to be a whopping 18 episodes long—wasn’t working.
One of the biggest takeaways from the original article, however, the bigger picture is Marvel’s ego. It’s a pretty damning report about Marvel’s foray into TV which many would already describe as a creative fumble. Marvel decided to make non-traditional TV, no showrunners, no show bibles, none of the elements of traditional TV making, and this probably explains why Marvel TV has been so iffy so far.
Marvel’s approach from the THR report was that they treated their shows like their movies, aka, fix it in post, and do tons of reshoots, which is expensive and timely and doesn’t work for TV, which is much longer.
So, in short, Marvel is reversing course and will forgo their original plan and will begin to use showrunners and follow the traditional model of TV filmmaking, which is honestly for the best because Marvel TV has not really worked outside of maybe “WandaVision.”
But if you look further into the article, there are signs that there were all these kinds of problems along the way. The THR article reveals that “Moon Knight,” show creator and writer Jeremy Slater quit somewhere during the making of the series, and filmmaker Mohamed Diab took the reins of the Oscar Isaac-starring series. Likewise, Jessica Gao wrote and created “She-Hulk: Attorney At Law,” but she was greatly sidelined once director Kat Coiro took control.
The article also notes that Kyle Bradstreet, a writer and executive producer on USA Network Emmy winner “Mr. Robot,” was fired from “Secret Invasion” after working on scripts for more than a year. “Secret Invasion” was a mess behind the scenes, according to THR. “By early September, a good portion of the’ Invasion’ team had been replaced, with new line producers, unit production managers and assistant directors,” and there had been a huge power-play struggle for control.
And in short, the entire article speaks to Marvel’s Studios TV wing being something of a mess. And their way or the highway wasn’t working.
This has frankly been Marvel’s model all along; they boasted early on that they would have no showrunners and feature a director-driven TV form. But TV is inherently a writer’s medium, with showrunners (the head writer) having full control because they’ve spent months breaking down the story with other writers and then hand off the finished thing to director-for-hire filmmakers. In film, directors often work alongside writers and are the ones managing rewrites and things that need to be overhauled while in the making of it; they are there during the process.
In short, Marvel probably realized with “Daredevil” how their film process in TV wasn’t working and, if you read between the lines, potentially causing bad blood in the TV industry by essentially angering TV showrunners and TV writers used to having more control. Marvel probably realized they were just swimming upstream all this time; it wasn’t going to work in the long run and potentially hurting their reputation in the TV industry when they went out to hire new writers and creatives who were likely under the impression they were working under the parameters that all other TV functions as.
Marvel is big and can break the rules, but maybe they realized, post-WGA-strike and post-VFX union organization, that much of their tactics were just going to anguish them in the end.
Here’s a quote that shows even TV directors were becoming upset. “The whole ‘fix it in post’ attitude makes it feel like a director doesn’t matter sometimes,” one source told THR.
So, the end product of all this? Changes to Marvel’s TV process.
“As it moves forward, Marvel is making concrete changes in how it makes TV. It now has plans to hire showrunners. The studio also plans on bringing full-time TV execs on board, rather than borrowing its film executives.”
Enough swimming against the tide, Marvel says. Let’s try and do it the way the experienced people do it.
