Big news from Marvel today, as they announced a new partnership with Netflix to produce four original live-action series based on their comic book characters, all 13 episodes each, and eventually to culminate in an Avengers-style miniseries combining them together, called The Defenders.
The four original characters set to each get their own show are Daredevil, Luke Cage, Iron Fist and Jessica Jones. Marvel fans will be familiar with all of them of course, and Daredevil will be the first out of the gate, his series set to premiere in 2015, and hopefully this show will help get rid of the bad taste left in fan's mouths from the Ben Affleck film version.
According to the press release from Marvel and Netflix, this is set to be "an epic that will unfold over multiple years of original programming," and it will "take Netflix members deep into the gritty world of heroes and villains of Hell's Kitchen, NY." Maybe that means these shows will be allowed to have more adult and R-rated content than the PG-13 films that are released every year? Netflix certainly hasn't been shy over content in their original programming so far, as far as that's concerned.
This is a pretty cool idea- it's extremely ambitious for Marvel to take on this kind of project, and it's a good way to get their slightly lesser known characters into the spotlight without having to make a feature film about them. Plus, I think this gives those characters the chance to be much less generic than a lot of the movies are starting to become lately, with the advantage of being able to embrace darker content that comes from being on Netflix. This whole idea has a lot of potential, but it assumes of course that they can gather the right creative talent for it- not just actors, but the writers and directors that would actually have a vision for it and be allowed to develop each beyond the stranglehold of Marvel's corporate control. Whether that can happen remains to be seen.
