Yesterday, it was announced that Marvel Studios and Netflix are to bring Daredevil, Luke Cage, Iron Fist and Jessica Jones to the small screen starting in 2016 with their own 13-part miniseries, building towards a fifth as the heroes team up for an adaptation of Marvel’s The Defenders, and now we have some comments from Disney CEO Bob Iger, who has spoken about the deal with Netflix, as well as revealing that another show (Agent Carter?) is being developed for ABC.
“This is a really smart deal we think, for Netflix, because they’ve done well already with some investments in original programming. And turning to branded programming is a smart and big step for them and Marvel certainly provides that. This gives us an opportunity to create and own four new series that Netflix will have exclusivity [on] for a period of time, starting in 2016, when the series are made available to them…These will be well-produced series that will take production investment to deliver the type of quality that we promised to Netflix… We will as a company, create more original programming for platforms that are not ours. We have some great networks with ABC, ABC Family, The Disney Channel, not to mention ESPN and Life but they’re not going to buy original, scripted programming for a while. But we can sell just so much programming from Marvel, we’ve got a good show in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and another one being developed for ABC, so more plans on our Disney channels with Marvel, but this seemed to be a great opportunity and I think there will be other opportunities on other platforms to do some more things.”
Meanwhile, speaking on a Disney shareholders conference call, Disney’s Senior Executive VP and CFO Jay Rasulo revealed that there’s still the possibility of The Defenders joining the ranks of the Marvel Cinematic Universe on the big screen, should they prove successful with the upcoming miniseries: “Marvel has thousands of characters…and it is not possible to mine them all with filmed entertainment. While these characters are attractive characters they are not among the most popular… it’s not likely we would have made feature films about them…though if they are popular on Netflix, they could become feature films.”
What are your thoughts on this latest raft of Marvel programming? Let us know in the comments below…
Originally published November 8, 2013. Updated April 15, 2018.
