For years, questions have plagued Marvel Studios about their relationship with their TV offshoots. Were those series canon? And if so, why did the movies generally ignore their existence, while the shows were always so thirsty to connect to the movies? The answer to these questions of canon—are they all connected or not canonically— seemed to arrive a few months ago when Disney+ added all of its Netflix series to the official Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline around the release of “Echo,” a series with close ties to Netflix’s “Daredevil.” Fans immediately assumed this meant all the Netflix shows and heroes were now part of the MCU proper, and it turns out they were right. During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter to promote “X-Men ’97,” Marvel exec Brad Winderbaum confirmed that the Netflix era of live-action shows (“Daredevil,” “Jessica Jones,” “Luke Cage,” “The Punisher,” “Iron Fist,” and “The Defenders”) are indeed part of MCU canon.
“We finally said it out loud,” Winderbaum said about the Marvel/Netflix canon decision. “Flash forward now to Disney+, where we are actually laying out the timeline with tiles on a screen, all of a sudden we’re like, ‘We should just do it. Let’s do it.’ It was also spurred by the redevelopment of ‘Daredevil: Born Again,’ once we started to really lean into some of the mythology and backstory that was established in those Netflix shows.”
Winderbaum also alluded to the times when Netflix appeared as if it wouldn’t be canon, and the studio just really hadn’t decided on the finality of it all until recently, suggesting that grappling with “Avengers: Infinity War,’ and “Avengers: Endgame” was just too much to contend with.
“When the Netflix shows were coming out and being made, we were building towards ‘Infinity War’ and ‘Endgame.’ We were trying to balance all of these film franchises and get them to culminate onscreen in these two epic movies. To say it was a challenge is not even correct,” he explained.
‘So, at the time, to say, “Alright, we’re also going to take this television show and wrap our heads around that,” it would’ve been too much, even though we were communicating back and forth,” he continued “Everyone on the television side and the film side knew what each other was doing, and you can see that there’s a continuity there. The references do line up, but it was just too much for us to wrap our minds around at the time.”
It sounds like “Daredevil: Born Again, ” which underwent an overhaul and creative pivot before production resumed, helped Marvel Studio reevaluate and decide these shows could be part of Marvel’s history retroactively.
“I was asked about this during the press for ‘Echo,’” Winderbaum said about the constant questions of canon. “And I realized, ‘Oh, it’s not just assumed. People have an active interest, and they want confirmation.’ So we were able to do it fairly quickly [with Disney+], and it’s interesting that the service of Disney+ actually became the statement just by rearranging those tiles. That’s our medium to define the canon now, which is wild to think about.”
There you go, definitiveness beyond a doubt. And we’ll see some of these finite results soon as “Daredevil: Born Again,” regroups most of the original cast and characters and even includes Jon Bernthal again as The Punisher (questions about the cast of “Iron Fist,” “Jessica Jones” and “Luke Cage,” and whether those actors will resume those roles remains a big question mark).
Winderbaum also spoke about the whiplash of the last few years: marching orders to increase the content volume at the beginning of the pandemic and then reversing that mandate only three years later.
“Certainly, the world has shifted,” he explained of why Marvel’s streaming footprint on Disney+ won’t be a free-for-all anymore. The original idea was that we could create whatever we wanted to launch Disney+ and have a home for new Marvel ideas to take place. And now we do have to be a little bit more judicious with our choices.’
How all this shakes out on the quality front remains to be seen. “Daredevil seems to be their main priority at the moment, with other shows like “Agatha,” “Ironheart,” and “Wonder Man” in various stages of post-production and on deck for releases on the streaming service. Regardless, whatever the case may be, Netflix as MCU canon is official, and fans who have argued over this one for years can finally put their swords down on the matter.
