Before Kevin Feige became the chief creative officer at Marvel, thanks to Disney, and the hiring of Brad Winderbaum to oversee Marvel Studios‘ takeover at Marvel Television (as both Jeph Loeb and Ike Perlmutter were removed from that division) there were some obvious frustrations between the old regime and Netflix, despite the streaming service greenlighting six different interconnective shows as the streamer ended up severing their relationship just when more spinoffs were in development.
Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos recalled to Variety that his previous relationship with the television division of Marvel (while making “Daredevil,” “Luke Cage,” Jessica Jones,” “Iron Fist,” “The Punisher,” and “The Defenders“) felt like a “fistfight” when they tried to contribute ideas the “thrifty” group was trying to save money every way possible so they could keep the cuts to the budget for themselves complicating that creative partnership.
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“On our shows, we were dealing with the old Marvel television regime, which operated independently at Disney. And they were thrifty. And every time we wanted to make the shows bigger or better, we had to bang on them. Our incentives were not well aligned. We wanted to make great television; they wanted to make money. I thought we could make money with great television.”
“You want to work with people whose incentives are aligned with yours. When people are producing for you, they’re trying to produce as cheaply as possible. My incentive is to make it as great as possible. That’s a lesson that I take forever. As producers, whatever [Marvel] didn’t spend, they kept. So every time we wanted to add something to the show to make it better, it was a fistfight.”
Sarandos’ head-butting with the Marvel Television team isn’t all that shocking to us. Ultimately, the relationship ended with all the shows being canceled and the characters’ futures tossed into a state of limbo as Marvel couldn’t touch them for years due to the deal with the streamer.
Perlmutter’s weird ongoing association with the Trump administration and attempts to insert himself with the Veterans Affairs Department were bizarre enough while still working at Marvel but Loeb (who was the real guy running things) saw claims of racism toward the Asian community that directly impacted folks working on the show. Leob was once called out to his face by “Iron Fist” actress Jessica Henwick during a convention panel at San Diego Comic-Con back in 2018 while dressed in karate gear making “bad jokes” before the panel even started and it was revealed by Peter Shinkoda (played the villain Nobu of The Hand in the original “Daredevil” series) those notions of Leob’s were even more sinister behind the scenes.
Shinkoda believed he was subsequently cut from an expected return in “The Defenders” only to be replaced by Sigourney Weaver due to Leph’s negative takes on Asian actors/characters. “‘Nobody cares about Chinese people and Asian people. There were three previous Marvel movies a trilogy called ‘Blade’ made where Wesley Snipes kills 200 Asians each movie, nobody gives a shit, so don’t write about Nobu and Gao,’” Shinkoda (who has since deleted his Twitter account) said in 2020 on a podcast supporting the revival of the “Daredevil” series of Loeb’s wild stance on Asian folks in the Marvel shows.
That “thrifty” comment feels warranted given the shows would eventually start recycling sets/locations and what felt like padding the episode runtime with plenty of filler scenes in certain shows.
That said, the Marvel/Netflix characters have been since welcomed into mainline MCU canon with “Daredevil: Born Again,” a new “Punisher” project coming to Disney+, and we could, in theory, see the return of Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Danny Rand in the future.