Marvel TV News

Jon Schnepp implied Moon Knight will appear in The Punisher--if so it would confirm my speculation he would be the rumoured hero appearing (he certainly makes sense in context). I'd guess this will be in the form of a cameo rather than an involved appearance (otherwise there would be marketing attached to it, ala the Punisher in Daredevil season two).

Speaking of predictions, we got confirmation that Vincent D'Onofrio, aka, Wilson Fisk (the Kingpin) will be joining Daredevil season three. New showrunner Erik Oleson (The Man in the High Castle etc) officially announced the decision which makes sense both in terms of fan service and for whatever version of the "Born Again" storyline we're going to get. The other thing this tells us is that Fisk won't appear in The Punisher (something I hadn't seen speculated, but within the realm of possibility given their interactions in Daredevil season two). My hope is that Fisk is the villain The Defenders have to face next--someone grounded and whose background is already understood by fans.

Filming, as far as we know, has not started (refuting MCU Exchange's rumour from a month ago), but presumably will commence soon. Along with this announcement it's also been confirmed that the show will air in 2018.

We know Finn Jones started martial arts training almost a month ago and now his co-star Jessica Henwick is back at it, suggesting the ramp up to Iron Fist season two is underway (my prediction was that filming would start in January, link above, but it could be even sooner).

Runaways filming recently wrapped (the pilot was filmed from February 10-March 3, with the rest of the show begun in June). The four months of filming is a similar timeframe for Netflix shows given that there's just 10 episodes (less the pilot, which presumably consists of the first two episodes). It's official trailer was unfortunately mostly a rehash of the earlier teaser and seemed to get no traction on social media. Hulu needs to work on its marketing (whatever you think of Inhumans there was no escaping the marketing).

An untitled ABC Marvel show has been announced with this premise:

The series will focus on the Sharif family, an ordinary Middle Eastern-American family with two superhero parents at a time when it’s illegal to be a superhero, so they are forced to save the world in secret.

Seemingly these are characters created for the show with a premise that's not far off the Fox default of "Mutant Menace." I worry that without an established character to market this has little hope in succeeding. When I first saw the headline I thought it might connect to a Ms Marvel show, but this clearly isn't that.

IMAX finally commented on their interpretation of what happened with the Inhumans and it's an interesting opinion (link below). They feel the problem was largely audience expectations:

Customers expected a production akin to a mega-budget blockbuster movie, rather than pilots for a television show. Moreover, the fact that this was Marvel IP set the bar at a level you wouldn’t see from other pieces of content or IP because of the reputation and the high production value of Marvel movies.

There's some truth to that I feel--the critical drubbing the movie-version received was far above what was warranted. IMAX's plan is to continue with the concept, but a away from Marvel to avoid those kinds of expectations (IMAX lost 11.1 million on the deal--how far off that was against their expectations is uncertain, as we know they expected to lose money).

Speaking of the Inhumans, the show slipped into terrible ratings territory for episode five, dropping below Agents of SHIELD's average (1.98, with an 0.4 in the key demographic--this is similar to "Wake Up", the least watched episode from AoS last year). The football game clearly hurt, as ratings improved somewhat for episode six (2.13 and 0.5). Comparatively, The Gifted dropped slightly, going from 3.5 to 3.36 (4%), the key demographic slipping from 1.1 to 1.0. This suggests the Fox show has hit its audience making it reasonably successful (it's DVR+ numbers remained steady at 64%).

I mentioned last time that lazy "superhero fatigue" arguments were re-circulating given the lower ratings for shows this fall. Armin is also peddling this crap, but it will be interesting to see if this floats up further into popular entertainment coverage. On its face the idea is ridiculous (as I've discussed before--pretty hard to justify the idea when the movie industry is being floated by comic book popularity). Ratings are falling due to poor writing, directing, etc, with networks pumping out generic crap trying to cash-in. I think the Netflix shows have pushed audience expectations in terms of quality, so mediocre fair isn't going to cut it. Whether this is a continuing trend or just a blip of the season remains to be seen.

This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)