Panic at Mouse Marvel: One Half of Disney Marvel's Daredevil Has Already Been Shot, But Kevin Feige Pulls a Zazlav and Burns the Film

Okay, he didn't burn the film, but he did scrap the half-filmed series -- and that's half of eighteen episodes, not just half of six -- and fired the writers and directors.

Actually they say "fewer than half" of the 18 episodes where filmed and then thrown into the incinerator, but I think that's spin. They always lie. They always lie their ratings up and lie their failures down.

The Hollywood Reporter, helping Disney spin this latest failure:

It didn't take long to see the problem after Marvel Studios' Daredevil: Born Again paused production in mid-June during the writers strike. Fewer than half of the series' 18 episodes had been shot, but it was enough for Marvel executives, including chief Kevin Feige, to review the footage and come away with a clear-eyed assessment: The show wasn't working.

So, in late September, Marvel quietly let go of head writers Chris Ord and Matt Corman and also released the directors for the remainder of the season as part of a significant creative reboot of the series, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. The studio is now on the hunt for new writers and directors for the project, which stars Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock, a blind lawyer turned superhero.

The Daredevil revamp is the latest in a series of growing pains for Marvel television.

Marvel television on Disney is now almost three years old. That makes it an adult in corporate years.

What's this "growing pains" bullshit?

...

T]he company eschewed the traditional TV-making model. It didn't commission pilots but instead shot entire $150 million-plus seasons of TV on the fly. It didn't hire showrunners, but instead depended on film executives to run its series. And as Marvel does for its movies, it relied on postproduction and reshoots to fix what wasn't working.

And that's been working like gangbusters for Marvel's theatrical releases lately, eh?

Even though they remain, along with Star Wars titles, the most watched shows on Disney+, Marvel series have recently faced a number of creative challenges and cries of diminishing returns from critics and audience metrics, causing a major shift at the studio to move to make TV shows the more traditional way.

wait I thought only misogynists and racists had a problem with Marvel's conveyor belt of unwatchable shit

...

With Daredevil's new direction, Marvel hopes to right the ship on a project with sky-high expectations. The show is Marvel's first to feature a hero who already had a successful series on Netflix, running three seasons. But sources say that Corman and Ord crafted a legal procedural that did not resemble the Netflix version, known for its action and violence. Cox didn't even show up in costume until the fourth episode. Marvel, after greenlighting the concept, found itself needing to rethink the original intention of the show.

That's what people want in a Daredevil show -- mid-2000s David Kelley light legal drama. Daredevil, meet Ally McBeal. We have to take on the supervillian Denny Crane (Denny Crane!)

And didn't they just try that with She-Hulk?

And wasn't that the worst Marvel show ever (until their next worst show ever, Secret Invasion)?

...

Even though the company does not have a writers-first approach to TV, directors could feel short-changed as well. "The whole 'fix it in post' attitude makes it feel like a director doesn't matter sometimes," says one person familiar with the process.

but only homophobic right-wing chuds say that, i thought

The article then notes that Secret Invasion was also a shit-show that went way off-schedule, and also required a replacement of the production team to finish.

And that turned out to be total crap -- the worst thing Marvel has made yet, and that's saying something -- so I wouldn't get your hopes up that Daredevil will be rescued.

As it moves forward, Marvel is making concrete changes in how it makes TV. It now has plans to hire showrunners. Gao's postproduction work on She-Hulk helped Marvel see that it would be helpful for its shows to have a creative throughline from start to finish.

They're counting She-Hulk as a success.

Wow. So that's the new standard of excellence?

It also is revamping its development process. Showrunners will write pilots and show bibles. The days of Marvel shooting an entire series, from She-Hulk to Secret Invasion, then looking at what's working and what's not, are done.

Interesting. So you're saying that filming an entire series or movie with the script barely finished and then reshooting most of the movie or series based on audience reactions isn't a cost-effective way to make entertainment?

Marvel has made one piece-of-shit movie and series after another, and they haven't bothered with such a major course-correction before. So why now?

Because Marvel's in absolute meltdown and there are only three projects that anyone cares about (apart from the Sony-owned Spider-Man sequels): 1, X-Men, 2, Fantastic Four, 3, Daredevil.

And Daredevil comes out first. If the public sees that Daredevil is yet another woke series aimed at tween girls -- filmed in the silly LOL WTF So Random! She-Hulk style -- the last remaining dead-ender Marvel fans will flee the franchise entirely.

And I hear that's exactly what Daredevil was -- a woke "oopsie-doopsies we're so silly we make poopsies" series continuing the tween-girl vibe all of Marvel has now.

Part of the Daredevil series, rumors say, will involve Punisher.

Let me establish how important Punisher is -- or was to Marvel:

Since the 80s, Punisher has consistently had a comic book devoted to him. He is one of the few characters to have sustained multiple comic books at once. Only Spider-Man and the X-Men manage that. His series has usually been in the top ten of Marvel comics by sales, and Marvel often shits out 100+ titles a month.

He's was also one of the few Marvel characters with multiple movies before the Product Conveyer-Belt called the MCU:

In 2006, X-Men 3 came out.

In 2007, the Spider-Man 3 came out.

In 2008, the third Punisher movie, Punisher War Zone, came out.

The Punisher had just as many movies as Spider-Man and the X-Men until 2008.

As far as merchandising, Spider-Man is without a doubt Marvel's biggest IP crop. But I'm just going to say that, based on experience and common-sense, the #2 and #3 IPs for t-shirts and merchandise are Punisher and Captain America. They might change year-to-year, but it's going to be those two fighting for 2nd place.

That established: One unconfirmed but much repeated plot leak about Daredevil is that it's about cops using the Punisher logo on their uniforms and cars, and both Daredevil and Punisher are angry about that.

This is a woke obsessive plot point. Marvel and its woke employees have been shrieking in distress -- always on Twitter, where they live -- for years because cops and soldiers often wear the Punisher skull logo or paint it on a tank, and woke Marvel losers hate cops and soldiers. They think Punisher is a "rightwing extremist hero" and have been trying to get Marvel to stop publishing him.

Well, they just did that. A year ago, they wrote a short series which was designed to make the audience hate the character and make him radioactive forever. They changed the character so that he no longer became a criminal-killer after his wife and children were killed by gangsters -- no, he is shown as a child to be a psychopath and serial-killer-in-waiting. The death of his wife and kids didn't make him a killer -- that was just an excuse to be the serial killer he always wanted to be.

They then show that he committed war crimes when he was a Marine and, far from being a hero, was just a broken, pathetic loser.

Most incredibly of all, they resurrected his wife so she could tell him she never loved him, always hated him, and also strongly hinted that "his" kids were not his kids at all -- she was banging a different guy.

Marvel actually turned the Punisher into a cuck.

And then they condemned him to spend eternity in a parallel world atoning for his sins.

All to teach the Rightwing Chuds who liked the Punisher logo a lesson.

Oh, by the way, they're making a new Punisher. This is still a greedy corporation, after all. They still want to sell the Punisher logo. They just don't want Rightwing Chuds to buy it.

So they'll slap the Punisher logo on a new, less-problematic character. Probably an SJW who beats up cops.

So given Marvel's determination to teach the Punisher (and all of his fans) a lesson, no one is very optimistic about his inclusion in the Daredevil series, especially not in a plotline involving the wokies' Twitter Obsession about cops daring to wear his logo.

Newsflash, Marvel: Cops don't fucking read Punisher. They don't read any comic books. No one reads comic books anymore due to your malignant incompetence.

They just like the skull logo. You haven't taught them anything. The only cops who know about this infantile bullshit (Punisher has been banished to the "Weird World" dimension, did you hear, Sergeant?) are the ones who just read this post.

Do shareholders know that Marvel just deliberately destroyed the value of one of its top ten pieces of IP, just because some permanent hysterics worked themselves up into a lather about it on Twitter?

Marvel destroyed a billion-dollar IP... to placate BLM activists.

Maybe shareholders should take notice of the priorities at Marvel and Disney.

Meahwhile:

Nielsen ratings have been released for Disney Lucasfilm's latest bomb Ahsoka. The show began with an anemic 1.2 million viewers, and steadily lost viewers as it grinded tediously along. The final episode was watched by only 800,000+ viewers.

Disney LucasFilm is planning to release a theatrical sequel to this series. As Valliant Renegade says, Disney cannot afford to spend $400 million to make a sequel movie to a series that people just didn't care about. This will be another of the long, long list of movies that Kaffeine Kennedy is supposedly making but which are never actually greenlit.

He also says that the ratings for season 2 of Loki are way down. Loki season 1 was the most-watched of all of Disney's terrible TV shows, but apparently people are just giving up on Marvel.

Want proof? Even Pitch Meeting Guy now says the only reason he bothers watching Marvel movies and TV shows is that people expect him to do Pitch Meetings about them, and he notes that everyone he knows feels this way.

When you've lost Pitch Meeting Guy...

It gets worse for Loki season 2. Loki season 2 will connect up with the movie that everyone is dying to not see, The Marvels. That's like increasing your boat's buoyancy by parking a boring, charisma-free truck with no ass on it.

They also say that the earlier screenings of The Marvels got audience scores of 30. After extensive editing, the new version got scores of... 28.

When a movie is awful, studios usually react by cutting and cutting and cutting it down to the shortest length possible, so they can pack in the most showings possible in the first weekend before word-of-mouth gets out about it. One guy in this podcast says that the film's length of 2 hours 40 minutes has been cut down to 1 hour 40 minutes, making it the shortest Marvel movie ever.

Bonus: The media, which has been promoting and protecting Bob Iger for 20 years as if he were Straight Obama, has turned on him and finally noticed he's a huge f*ck-up who loses billions.

They're reporting that he's "exhausted" and routinely whines to confederates that he regrets having come back from his semi-retirement.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:18 PM

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