Netflix: The Site Without Fear
Massive news exploded the nerd world this morning as Marvel and Netflix announced that no less than five shows based around Marvel superheroes would be coming to the site in the near future. Daredevil, Luke Cage, Iron Fist and Jessica Jones will all get their own 13 episode seasons, which will then culminate in a new Defenders show with all four characters teaming up. The shows will all be live action and most likely will be in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as they are all owned by Marvel proper. Of course, they could do some sort of Marvel Knightsesque universe for these characters, especially if they are a little darker than the Marvel features we’ve seen so far, which seems like a possibility as it seems like Netflix might get slightly looser restrictions than ABC has for Agents of Shield, which is probably the lightest and fluffiest show on television.
Obviously, the most exciting development is the new Daredevil show. He isn’t a mainstream character but his book has been steadily great with some amazing runs by the likes of Kevin Smith and Ed Brubaker and the more street level crime he deals with mixed with supervillains like Bullseye and Kingpin would seem to be a great fit for a series, especially if it was more in the vein of CW’s Arrow, which, while featuring some CW relationship soapyness also has some great villains that are, with slight modifications, basically their comic incarnations and also has some great action and fight sequences, both of which would definitely benefit a Daredevil show. An actual comic inspired Bullseye would most likely be amazing and could be a recurring villain through out the series. You could also focus some of the episode on Matt’s law cases, which might draw in people who are not fully on board for a full blown superhero show. There’s also potential for a character like The Punisher to show up and blow every nerd’s mind. Matt and Frank have had some epic battles over the years, usually due to the fact that Frank usually wants to kill a criminal Matt wants to put behind bars.
The main thing to overcome would obviously be the Daredevil movie with Ben Affleck, although the Director’s Cut is apparently decent. A lot of people’s only exposure to the character is that movie and there will probably be a lot of bias going in because of the failure of that film to really capture what make the character interesting.
Luke Cage and Iron Fist are also exciting but I’m a little concerned that they aren’t together as heroes for hire. Iron Fist has a great recent run of comics but Luke Cage never really carried his own title and while you can go into crazy magic and martial arts territory with Iron Fist, I’m not sure what a Luke Cage solo show would be.
The other show, Jessica Jones, is a character probably only the most hardcore Marvel fans know, she is Luke Cage’s wife and superhero who was also a reporter/private investigator who has been on the staff of The Daily Bugle, a member of the New Avengers and runs her own investigation agency called Alias Private Investigations. That seems like a natural setup for a show, where Jessica get a different client each week to help a la Burn Notice.
Bottom line, this is insanely exciting news and the level of quality for most of the Netflix Original Shows is so high that something catastrophic would have to happen to make these Marvel shows horrible disasters. What would you guys want to see from these new Marvel shows, any ideas for casting, etc? Leave them in the comments.