Static Thoughts - Future of Marvel TV

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As I write this, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is at something of a crossroads.  The films have entered such an institutional point in our culture that even widespread disinterest is more or less unable to derail their success.  Cycles of disappointment, disengagement, rediscovery, and reappraisal have been sped up to an insane degree and Marvel’s cross-media presence has pretty much guaranteed them cultural dominance through to the end of the decade.  What’s more, their series of Netflix shows have proven thoroughly successful and aside from a handful of major casting flubs the MCU is the most powerful it’s been since Avengers. 

The one area where things have faltered, however, is on TV, with the network television side of the MCU slowly atrophying as projects end up postponed, canceled, or passed on.  Agents of SHIELD is barreling ahead into another season but the proposed spin-off Most Wanted was passed over, the Damage Control show seems to have been quietly scuttled, and Agent Carter was officially canceled.  All of this has folks wondering: what does the future hold for Marvel television?

Static Thoughts - The Case for More Agent Carter

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Edited by Robert Beach

Let’s talk about Agent Carter. Springing out of the surprise success of Captain America in the early 2010s, Agent Carter was the second major attempt by the highly successful Marvel Studios to transition from films to television. After the tepid response to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in 2013, Agent Carter’s 2015 launch was vaunted as Marvel TV done right with Kevin Feige promising a true experience to wow and engage audiences, and, at first, that’s what we got. The first season of Agent Carter wasn’t necessarily great, but it was solid as far as period espionage plots go. 

What’s more, the show had a solid core focusing on the way women were being forced out of the independence World War 2 afforded them that would shape the feminist and sexual revolutions going forward. Marvel immediately threw away all that good will with the second season, and the show was canceled. Fan demand for a revival has already started, and while I’m not super on board with such exercises, I do think that Agent Carter deserves a second chance to be the hit series it never really got the chance to be.  

Will Powerless include the Global Guardians?

Edited by Robert Beach 

One of the bizarre paradoxes of superhero adaptations seems to be that the fewer major properties a studio owns, the better their work turns out.  For instance, DC/WB has owned the rights to all of their characters from the word go, and they’ve yet to churn out a good non-Batman movie this century. Conversely, Marvel, who lacked access to either of their major franchises, turned a handful of B-list heroes into the biggest multimedia franchise on the planet right now. 

The same seems to be true in the world of television where the fractured rights landscape of DC has rendered excellent hits like Supergirl, Flash, and Legends of Tomorrow while Marvel has the disappointing Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter. Now DC/WB is back at the act with weird and fractured comics rights with the new NBC comedy series Powerless, the first set photos of which have just premiered.

From all accounts, Powerless is set to be an office comedy set in a world full of superheroes, magic, and aliens. I’m not entirely sure how that will work if the idea is that the office workers have super powers in the vein of Cracked.com’s Anti-Heroes, or they’re just replacing generic Office-style shenanigans with time travel, super villain schemes, and alien invasions. I’m tempted to think it’s the latter of the two, treating the boom and bombast of standard superhero adventure with the banal attitude of classic mundanity has always been an easy path to hilarity.  

Stuff like The Tick, Formerly Known As The Justice League, and the collected works of Brian Michael Bendis have all mined this lucrative vein of nerd comedy to great success in the past. In either event, the world of Powerless will still require superheroes if it wants to sell its general idea of being in a superhero universe and that’s where things get weird.

Unlike Marvel, who own all of their TV rights, DC’s television adaptation rights are incredibly fractured. That’s why Arrow and Flash are on CW while Supergirl is on CBS, Gotham is on Fox, and Constantine was on NBC. This means even if NBC wanted its superhero universe to feature big-name heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman, they couldn’t get the rights.

However, DC still has an incredible backlog of characters that have never even come close to a live-action adaptation and work perfectly to fill the ranks of Powerless background players. This lets the writers of the show avoid having to come up with new heroes week to week, welcomes nerd viewership by NBC slapping a big DC Comics logo, and get free publicity from blogs like this one. Hey, everyone likes sausage, but no one wants to know how it gets made, right? 

In any event, the first two heroes to appear on Powerless have been announced and we’ve caught a glimpse of one of them. The heroes are Crimson Fox and Jack O’ Lantern. Both of whom I was already thoroughly familiar with long before this announcement because, as established, weird comics and I go together perfectly. Crimson Fox makes a decent amount of sense for an addition as her powers and design are pretty well suited to a quick and easy adaptation. What’s more, she’s only about D-list as far as things go. Though she’s never made it to a multimedia adaptation, Crimson Fox was a member of the Justice League for a time.... sort of. 

After DC rebooted their universe for the first time in 1986, one of the caveats going forward was a brand new Justice League that would feature a whole host of new, internationally themed characters. Thus was born the Justice League International along popular spin-off comic Justice League Europe. Crimson Fox joined as a member of the JLE during the mid point of its very respectable and thoroughly enjoyable run.  

She was a French superhero who had super pheromones in addition to some enhanced physicality, and a costume that looked absolutely nothing like a fox. Eventually, the multi-Justice League era imploded under the weight of other spin-offs like Justice League Antarctica and Justice League Task Force. After that, Crimson Fox dropped off the map for years and years before reappearing in the Global Guardians.

That brings us to the second hero: Jack O’ Lantern.  Jack O’ Lantern was a founding member of the Global Guardians, a weird substrata of the DC universe in its own right. The Global Guardians popped up in the early ‘80s as a direct response to the various characters added to the Super Friends TV show to increase diversity. The idea of the time was to be a version of the Justice League on a Global scale, emphasizing diversity and international cooperation. As such, they had members from England, Brazil, Germany, Australia, Israel, Japan, Greece, and even Native Americans. 

The team were more or less forgotten after their brief initial run, save for members Green Fire and Ice Maiden; they went on to join the Justice League International. The team was revived during Crimson Fox’s tenure as a kind of international superhero watchdog force as a way to curb American metahuman activity. The new team featured mostly new members as most of the original heroes became part of yet another international superhero force: The Ultramarine Corp.

So what does all this actually mean? Well, maybe nothing, yet maybe that the world of superheroes we’re about to see on Powerless is meant to be one of broader diversity and international action. The vast miasma of heroes from across the Global Guardians and Ultra Marine Corp are more than enough to fill out the background ranks of a superhero universe while also giving the proceedings a unique style and look.  

Additionally, most of the costumes required for the various characters would be pretty easy to put together, and none of them boost super powers that would be too difficult to replicate. I don’t really know why the makers of Powerless would settle on this particular route, but it’s not a terrible idea to say the least. Provided the framing of their universe isn’t about a background tapestry of interesting and diverse heroes used to back-up a collection of dull white office drones, that’d be a pretty terrible misstep. 

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Daredevil Season 2 Trailer Round-Up

Edited by Robert Beach

In exactly one week’s time, Netflix and Marvel will join forces for the third time to bring us the highly anticipated second season of Daredevil. So far, Marvel’s Netflix offerings have been pretty solid ranging from the enjoyable, if moderately overrated, Daredevil season 1 to the exceptional knockout that was Jessica Jones. Both serve as a major point of contrast to the often less-than-stellar Marvel network shows like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. or Agent Carter. 

However, it’s also pretty clear Marvel was initially planning to put together a second Daredevil season this quickly as most of their Netflix wheels turn pretty hard towards the Defenders crossover.  Daredevil season 2 as a quasi-last minute “give the most popular guy a sequel while we work on the next 2 pre-crossover things” lands it in the same bin of creation that gave us Iron Man 2. Given that, I’ve compiled all the pertinent advertising media and rumors so…let’s talk about Daredevil season 2.

Is Scott Adkins Our Iron Fist?

As 2015 has dragged on one thing has become abundantly clear: Marvel Studio’s future in phase 3 is far less certain than anybody really expected.  More and more the little studio that could has turned into the big studio that can’t seem to get out of its own way.  Marvel’s phase 2 has had some major financial success certainly but culturally the studio has only gotten more scattershot and less solid at predicting what, among its many properties, will be a legitimate smash with audiences or just make a lot of money.  Sure Iron Man 3 was a major financial success but it’s not like anyone is genuinely interested in diving deeper into the Mandarin, AIM, or Extremis any time soon.  The same way Age of Ultron broke all kinds of records but spent the summer getting stomped on at the box office and in the popular consciousness by Jurassic World. 

Meanwhile, less studio involved projects like Ant-Man, Daredevil, Agent Carter, Jessica Jones, and chief of all Captain America: Winter Soldier have found major traction with audiences.  All of this has made Marvel’s upcoming “phase 3” a much shakier and more uncertain place for the once untouchable kings of pop culture.  That their films will still gross solid returns is without question but the lingering issue of “will people still be talking about Marvel in the year 2020” has only become more and more prevalent.  Turns out you can’t sustain cultural impact through cross genre-continuity alone but damned if they aren’t going to try because it looks like Marvel has decided to add another hero to Dr. Strange in the form of Scott Adkins as Iron Fist.

AMC's Preacher Premiere Trailer

Preacher was a Vertigo Comic by acclaimed author Garth Ennis and equally beloved artist Steve Dilon.  Lasting for a total 75 issues it’s considered a major hallmark for comics and is one of the universal counters to the claim that comics sucked in the ‘90s as the series lasted from 1995 to 2000.  Recently, rising star comedian Seth Rogan has set-up about bringing the show to AMC in what, I assume, was an attempt to recreate the monster success the network enjoyed with The Walking Dead.  Against pretty much everyone’s better judgment that adaptation is going forward with a confirmed 10 episodes set for a premiere next year and Dominic Cooper set to play the lead character of Jesse Custer.  Cooper is actually a bit of a get for the series as he’s most well known for playing Howard Stark in Captain America: The First Avenger and Agent Carter making him one of the many Marvel actors crossing the floor to a DC project.  Now, the first full trailer has premiered for the show and surprise; it’s garbage. 

Marvel's Damage Control Show Coming to ABC

Edited by Robert Beach 

Marvel television is a spotty enterprise to be sure. As much as I loved Daredevil and enjoyed Agent Carter, there’s no getting around the many problems that seem to plague Marvel’s television projects. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is the least interesting and least ambitious superhero show on the air right now. It's completely dwarfed by the conceptual craziness and continuity of Flash and Arrow while simultaneously being completely outclassed by Gotham’s stylistic affectations. That’s not even touching the excellent indie comic shows like iZombie or the long running and beloved Walking Dead. 

Add in upcoming challengers like Lucifer, Preacher, and Legends of Tomorrow, it’s obvious the TV game is rife with far more challengers than Marvel is really equipped to handle just yet. As such, it makes some sense that they’re actually working to expand their market share with a new kind of show. While Daredevil was a gritty crime series, Agent Carter a period piece and Agents of SHIELD a blatant marketing tool, Marvel’s latest TV venture will be a comedy based off the obscure comic series Damage Control.

Madame Masque Villain of Agent Carter Season 2

Edited by Robert Beach 

here’s no denying this has been a rough year for Marvel studios. Age of Ultron did well but wasn’t the same cultural smash as the first film, and Ant-Man’s modest success was undercut by the MCU’s ongoing issues with representation. Yet one area Marvel has really thrived in 2015 is in television. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was finally able to find a major audience as it ramped up its connection to the films; Daredevil was a smash hit on Netflix that catapulted the Kingpin to a major villain position and helped fast track Jessica Jones, and their winter mini-series Agent Carter has been picked up for a full series. 

Now with half of the year over, and the fall and winter seasons looming, the first details on Agent Carter season 2 are beginning to filter through the media cracks. Some early news indicated the series was going to be set predominately in Hollywood this season and would feature the return of Howard Stark despite Dominic Cooper’s role in Preacher. The first major reveal has been slipped: the season 2 villain will be Iron Man antagonist Madame Masque. 

Ant-Man's Role in Marvel Phase 3

So, given that Ant-Man’s been out for a week now I think it’s fair enough to dive into the minutia of his film and what the tells us about Marvel going forward and where he and his supporting cast will most likely pop up next.  This means this blog post will have spoilers for Ant-Man so if you’re still unsure on the film, first go read my review of it, then go see it, then come back here to see where all that’s going and will pop up next.  

 

Devil Dinosaur, Clone Saga, & Marvel's Future

So the numbers are officially in and Jurassic World has beaten Avengers as the third highest grossing film of all time, earning it a sequel that will go head-to-head with Avengers: Infinity War part 1.  This marks yet another major defeat for Marvel who’ve shaped up to have a pretty bad year all around.  Age of Ultron has been subsumed in the wake of hits like Furious 7 and Jurassic World with more competition coming this fall between Spectre and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  What’s more Ant-Man hasn’t shown a lot of audience interest and critically it’s only served to raise a lot of problematic issues with the Marvel universe as a whole.  The only Marvel projects that seem to really be gelling with audiences these days are episodic in nature, stuff like the major interest in Agent Carter, Agents of SHIELD finally finding a major audience, and Daredevil ending up a major cultural hit.  What does all this mean for Marvel going forward?  Could we be seeing the end of Marvel Studios?

iZombie - Blaine's World Review

In case you aren't one of my normal readers over at Front Towards Gamer you don't know that I also review TV shows, specifically shows adapted from comics or that have been featured as comics I've reviewed.  My previous reviews include Gotham, The Flash, Doctor Who, The Strain, Constantine, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Agent Carter, Powers, and Daredevil.  This week however I take a look at the season finale to iZombie, a series that started out bland and mediocre but clawed its way up to being a stand out creative endeavor with a ton of passion behind it.  See the full review here.