As Comic-Con 2024 showed audiences, Marvel Studios is moving away from that big Hall H announcement visual calendar and barely revealed much of what’s to come beyond 2026. But occasionally, what’s in development at Marvel is revealed through what’s canceled or what’s paused.
To that end, Deadline reports that Marvel Television has hit pause on three TV series, one that was already reported and two that are brand new and heretofore unknown at Marvel. The first is “Nova,” the space set series connected to the Nova Corp seen in the “Guardians Of The Galaxy” movies. With showrunners and writers hired—“Criminal Minds” alumnus Ed Bernero hired as the lead writer and showrunner for the series—and casting rumors already in the air, “Nova” was in active development, and it was thought that the series would shoot sometime in 2025 and be ready for 2026. Alas, it seems like Marvel is hitting the brakes on the series, so now it’s just a big question mark.
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The second series revealed to be pausing its development is “Strange Academy,” essentially a magical school run by “Doctor Strange” that teaches young sorcerers to use and hone their powers properly. However, Deadline says this version of the show would have centered on Benedict Wong’s Wong character, which is a fun and engaging way to backdoor a solo project for the character and introduce new characters while you’re at it. Wong is great, so let’s hope that happens at some point.
The third TV show that Marvel is hitting pause on is “Terror, Inc.” Created by writers Dan Chichester and Margaret Clark and artist Klaus Janson in the early ‘90s, “Terror, Inc.” stars the antihero Terror, an eternal entity that absorbs the talents of others through their dismembered limbs. Part of the Marvel horror world, it’s rumored that Terror would have been part of the brewing mystical/magical/horror-tinged “Midnight Sons” project that has been in development at Marvel at some time but never officially acknowledged by the studio.
So far, there’s no news on who was developing either “Strange Academy” or “Terror Inc.”
Marvel insiders stress to the trade that none of these projects were greenlit, and it’s part of Marvel’s new TV process which is develop much more than they actually make.
All three projects may still come to fruition sometime in the future, but Marvel has evidently shifted priorities at the moment. To what, exactly? That’s unclear, but Marvel’s head of Television, Brad Winderbaum, did tease a change in the creative approach last summer and suggested quality control was the most important aspect.
“We’re developing more than we make now, so we actually have a few different things brewing that we might see through to at least a pilot script to see if we want to make it,” Winderbaum said in August. “But, there’s a lot of opportunity out there, it’s hard to choose favorites… We’re really being careful about what we choose to do next.”
Careful indeed. So as of right now, that means the only live-action Marvel Studios/Marvel Television arriving in 2026 will be “VisionQuest,” and the second season of “Daredevil: Born Again.”
