While it would be unfair to say Marvel Studios' foray into streaming has been a failure, it also hasn't played out quite as we - or they - hoped.
Too many new characters have been introduced (leaving many stuck in limbo) and quite a few shows have disappointed fans. Now, Marvel Studios is going back to the drawing board and approaching TV in a new way.
That's led to Daredevil: Born Again being overhauled and to the studio taking a more traditional approach to small screen storytelling; rather than making them like movies, they're now getting showrunners and being produced like any other series.
Talking to Entertainment Weekly, Marvel Studios' Head of Marvel Streaming, Television and Animation, Brad Winderbaum, shared additional insights into this new direction for Marvel Television.
"Now," Winderbaum says, "we are thinking about television really more like traditional television where they could last for multiple seasons, where we can see the characters brew in the culture for hopefully many years. One thing we are doing is we're developing a lot of shows now simultaneously."
He adds, "So, in a way, we're making television more in a traditional style where we are going to write multiple pilots and show bibles before we decide what we want to produce and actually bring to the screen, which gives us an opportunity to experiment and also to plan all sorts of different Marvel sandboxes."
Now Marvel Studios has figured this out, it feels like we're in store for the same level of consistently strong storytelling we got from early MCU TV shows like WandaVision and Loki.
Elsewhere in the interview, Winderbaum commented on the Vision TV series being passed from Agatha All Along showrunner Jac Schaeffer to Star Trek: Picard season 3's Terry Matalas.
"[Matalas] and Jac have talked, and that show is really a love letter to everything that Jac built before and also continues on in a way that's unique to that filmmaker," Winderbaum explains. "There is a long tradition in Marvel, whether it was [director] Shane Black taking the baton from [Iron Man and Iron Man 2 filmmaker] Jon Favreau for Iron Man 3, or the Russos taking the baton [from Joss Whedon] in Avengers."
"Just like the comics, these franchises benefit from different storytellers, different artists playing with the material in new ways."
2025 will see the release of Daredevil: Born Again and Ironheart on Disney+, but it likely won't be until 2026 or 2027 that we see Marvel Studios' overhauled approach to TV in full effect.