For a long time, Marvel seemed as invincible as Thanos after he assembled the Infinity Gauntlet. Their movies were all massive hits and critical successes. They moved into TV with a lot of early success, including WandaVision and the first season of Loki. The Marvel Cinematic Universe looked like it would continue to grow forever.
The last year or so has brought the company back to Earth. Recent productions like Eternals and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania have earned so-so reviews and commensurate grosses. And their recent TV series have gotten even harsher receptions, including this summer’s extremely disappointing Secret Invasion. Marvel has a lot of very exciting titles on the horizon, but their recent output is definitely not as consistent as it used to be.
Some of the reasons why are detailed in a damning new piece in The Hollywood Reporter, which outlines a lot of previously unknown turmoil and turnover at the company’s TV division. While most of the piece is about how the company is now in the midst of “revamping” its upcoming Daredevil: Born Again series while it is still in production (supposedly because Marvel felt it “wasn’t working” with its original writers), it also outlines a series of issues behind the scenes at several recent Marvel Disney+ series.
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The article reveals, for example, that the creator and writer of their Moon Knight show, Jeremy Slater, “quit,” at which point “director Mohamed Diab took the reins” on the series. It also claims She-Hulk writer Jessica Gao was “sidelined” on the show after director Kat Coiro became involved, but was later “brought back to oversee postproduction.”
Moon Knight had the benefit of a very good Oscar Isaac performance at its center, but it was hard not to see that show as a disappointment. It ranks very low on my own ranked list of Marvel Disney+ series, where I wrote that it had “all the ingredients to make one of Marvel’s best productions” yet somehow “fell almost totally flat.” Hearing there was a lot of staff changes going on at the show certainly does not shock me.
THR’s piece claims that Marvel is currently rethinking the way its makes TV beyond just changing Daredevil: Born Again. It supposedly plans to start employing a more traditional authority structure moving forward, where previously they were making their shows much like their movies in terms of development and production. We’ll have to wait and see if the changes begin producing better results.
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