Since the advent of scripted television, the medium has largely revolved around pilots being shot and showrunners being hired to test out a prospective series, and then ensure there’s a single creative force steering the vision should it be awarded a full-season order. Having learned the hard way that some rules weren’t made to be broken, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is back at the drawing board.
A bombshell story from The Hollywood Reporter revealed the mishandling of the franchise’s small screen content has gotten so out of hand that Daredevil: Born Again has booted the majority of its key creatives and will effectively start from scratch once again when the strikes are over, but you can’t say it hasn’t been a long time coming.
The MCU’s Disney Plus content has avoided the term “showrunner” like the plague since its inception, with Kevin Feige and his bosses signing off on multi-episode runs that cost upwards of $150 million to produce, leading to wildly polarizing or often flat-out terrible results in the case of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law and Secret Invasion. As one insider put it, “TV is a writer-driven medium, Marvel is a Marvel-driven medium.”
Not any more, though. It’s noted that Marvel will now be hiring and relying upon showrunners, writing proof-of-concept pilots and show bibles, avoiding the recurring habit of shooting everything and then working backwards from there to see what went wrong. Daredevil: Born Again might need to be born again… again, but it could be the start of a brave new era for the superhero saga’s flagging episodic adventures.
