Holy freaking crap! I know Disney is keen to work the Marvel franchise as much as they can, but this is an epic, monumental deal! Disney/Marvel has announced that to develop ‘4 serialized programs leading to a mini-series programming event’, based around 4 of Marvel’s characters – Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist and Luke Cage.
The epic will unfold over multiple years of original programming, taking Netflix members deep into the gritty world of heroes and villains of Hell’s Kitchen, New York.
Netflix has committed to a minimum of 4, 13 episodes series and a culminating Marvel’s The Defenders mini-series event that reimagines a dream team of self-sacrificing, heroic characters.
This seems to be an attempt by Disney to replicate the success of Marvel’s big screen Avengers outings on the smaller screen, and why wouldn’t they! It’s a huge coup for Netflix, who I suspect are going to see a massive rise in subscriptions over this. Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos has said
“Marvel’s movies, such as ‘Iron Man’ and ‘Marvel’s The Avengers,’ are huge favorites on our service around the world. Like Disney, Marvel is a known and loved brand that travels. With ‘House of Cards’ and our other original series, we have pioneered new approaches to storytelling and to global distribution and we’re thrilled to be working with Disney and Marvel to take our brand of television to new levels with a creative project of this magnitude.”
A 52 episode deal, plus a mini series, is an epic commitment from any traditional network, let alone Netflix. It seems (as a great man once said) times, they are a changin…