Head Of Marvel TV Announces Strategy Shift To "Comfort Viewing Reliability" Ahead Of 'Daredevil: Born Again' Release
Ahead of the release of Daredevil: Born Again on Disney+, the head of Marvel TV Brad Winderbaum announced a shift in the TV division’s strategy to one of “comfort viewing reliability.”
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly about the upcoming show that sees Charlie Cox return as Daredevil and Vincent D’Onofrio reprise his role as Kingpin, Winderbaum seemingly revealed his team’s focus is now on creating “shows that last for multiple seasons” according to EW’s Nick Romano.
To that point, Winderbaum said the aim to was get back to “comfort viewing reliability.” He also confirmed Daredevil: Born Again is multi-season show saying, “One-hundred percent it’s a multi-season show.” However, he did add the caveat, “I don’t know how many seasons it’ll run.”
The creative team behind the show is already working on a second season with showrunner Dario Scardapane sharing that following a creative reboot of the series the creative team of the show is now a “better-oiled machine.”
He also explained that Season 2 “is really kind of part 2 of season 1, so it allows us to go into bigger and different places.” A newly introduced villain named Muse is expected to have a “ripple effect that extends beyond” season 1.
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Winderbaum’s announcement of this new strategy comes in the wake of him revealing back in October 2023 that the entire Marvel TV team was going to be completely restructured.
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, he said, “We’re trying to marry the Marvel culture with the traditional television culture. It comes down to, ‘How can we tell stories in television that honor what’s so great about the source material?’”
Borys Kit of The Hollywood Reporter went on to share, “Marvel is making concrete changes in how it makes TV. It now has plans to hire showrunners. … The studio also plans on having full-time TV execs, rather than having executives straddle both television and film. … 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.”
Marvel’s Disney+ television shows have faltered with recent releases. The most recent release Agatha All Along had a premiere worse than The Acolyte, which was scrapped by Marvel’s parent company Disney due to low viewership. The show was only viewed 426 million minutes in its opening week according to Nielsen. In contrast, The Acolyte did 488 million minutes watched in its opening week.
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The show did manage to garner 744 million minutes watched in the week of its season finale, but those numbers were bolstered due to the show releasing two episodes that week.
In contrast, the week of The Acolyte’s one-episode finale, the show only brought in 335 million minutes.
If you simply divide Agatha’s numbers by two it only performed marginally better than The Acolyte at 372 million minutes viewed.
Before Agatha All Along, Marvel Studios dumped all five episodes of Echo onto its platform on the same day. The show debuted on Nielsen’s chart the first week it released with 731 million minutes watched.
However, by the week after all the episodes were dropped on Disney+ the show was nowhere to be seen on Nielsen’s charts.
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Before Echo, Marvel released the second season of Loki. According to Nielsen it only brought in 446 million minutes watched during the week of its premiere.
For comparison, the first season’s premiere brought in 731 million minutes watched.
What do you make of this new strategy for Marvel TV?
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