As with most things, the perception online doesn’t always reflect real life, and there is an example of this with Marvel Television‘s “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” the superhero lawyer show led by Canadian actress Tatiana Maslany playing Bruce Banner’s professional cousin, Jennifer Walters, who is able to transform into She-Hulk after an accident involving Banner. It ended up getting a lot of flak for being too similar to Deadpool (She-Hulk’s meta antics in the comics, mind you, predate Wade Wilson’s) and felt like a “culture war” lightning rod for the “it’s too woke” crowd that needed a new target of ire.
Well, Marvel Television exec Brad Winderbaum is dispelling the myth to the Escape Pod podcast (via ComicBookMovie) that negative squawking on social media and YouTube had a huge negative impact on the viewership numbers, which he claims is one of their “best-performing shows” with the general audience, and is still open to the idea of doing another season.
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“I love ‘She-Hulk.’ I’d love to make more ‘She-Hulk,’ Winderbaum said, “I mean, I’ll tell you this about ‘She-Hulk.’ That’s one of our best-performing shows. It just hit the general audience.”
Oddly enough, something like “Daredevil: Born Again” Season 1 has one of the worst viewership numbers for an MCU show on Disney+ (well below shows like “Echo” and “Ms. Marvel“), and you cannot escape the obsession with it on social media. The duality of fandom is that they don’t always represent the general audience, even if they’re the loudest online (we’ll be rooting for Season 2 to do better viewership the second time around). Charlie Cox‘s first big return to the role, having been in “She-Hulk,” and the two characters hooking up was certainly one of the cooler moments of the show.
That said, I think most of us understand WHY there hasn’t been a second season of “She-Hulk,” and it’s likely down to budgeting, as one of the behind-the-scenes issues that was even addressed within the meta show itself in the final episode, skipping a costly showdown action sequence entirely. Which isn’t a crazy thing to point out, given that the money for VFX needed to bring multiple Hulk characters and She-Hulk herself likely wasn’t exactly what Disney+ originally wanted to spend (a live-action “Hulk” TV show on ABC was scrapped and replaced by “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ” once upon a time).
This may explain why some other gestating MCU TV projects like Don Cheadle‘s “Armor Wars” (could be linked to the “Secret Invasion” series being a misfire) and the cosmic-focused “Nova” were quietly placed into limbo around the time the Ryan Coogler-produced “Ironheart” (a “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” spinoff) was ramping up (another pricey VFX-heavy MCU show). Then again, we have to imagine that the upcoming Paul Bettany show “VisionQuest” isn’t going to be a cheap venture either, with the return of James Spader‘s Ultron and other A.I./robotic characters expected to appear.
We don’t really know how Maslany truly feels about a return to the MCU in this moment, other than her comedic hijinks on the “Comedy Bang Bang” podcast, throwing out fake Marvel rumors on multiple appearances in the hopes of trolling the geek news community into spreading them. The fate of She-Hulk on the big and small screens seems to be up in the air (we should point out she was part of the “Secret Wars” lineup in the comics, alongside having memberships in the Avengers and The Fantastic Four).
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
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- Christopher Marc
