Considering the sheer extent of Marvel productions that arrive on an annual basis, be it in cinemas or on Disney+, it can become easy to find it all a tad overwhelming and as though there is too much being offered up to fans. Marvel fatigue is a real issue, but it's perhaps an issue we take too much for granted, as even as soon as a decade ago, while the films were popular, the television side of the business was far less familiar.
Aside from Agents of Shield and a few smaller spinoffs, Marvel TV projects were basically made for Netflix, who took on the various Defenders and began cranking out shows in a grittier and darker version of New York than the one painted in the theatrical universe. "Netflix didn't make the show. Marvel Television made the show." But how did this come about? We recently had a chance to catch up with legendary writer and former Marvel Television head Jeph Loeb at San Diego Comic Con Malaga, where he explained what happened behind the scenes.
"I remember saying that the movies look very red, white and blue. And I don't mean that in any kind of patriotic sense or American sense. I said, really, what I'm talking about is, is that Iron Man is red. Captain America is blue. And if you look at what New York looks like, it's a very shiny white light. The Avengers Tower was this white light and the streets were clean and everybody was walking around like it was the safest place on Earth, living in New York," Loeb began.
"And I wanted to do a story that took place in Hell's Kitchen. And I said to everybody, take a look at the movies that were made in the early 1970s by Martin Scorsese, whether it was Taxi Driver or Billy Friedkin who did the French Connection. I said, they were shot in a part of New York that you didn't want to go into. And I said, when you look at the colour scheme on our shows, I want the blue to be so faded out that it sort of looks like steel and that the yellow is more like the amber on a taxi cab when the light headlights are coming around at night and that there's steam coming out of the street because we're in Hell's Kitchen. So Hell is below us. And that set a tone and it basically said, look, it doesn't mean we're not going to do jokes. It doesn't mean that we're not going to have that Marvel special feel to it. But we are going to be a little bit more violent and we are going to be a little bit more like the comics."
Loeb then talked about how Netflix came into the equation and helped achieve the dream of a more rooted and gritty Marvel world.
"And I'm very grateful to the people at Netflix. And I'm really super grateful to the upper management at Marvel who said, go ahead. Because the movie people looked at us like we were gum on their shoe," Loeb outlined.
"And so my boss of the television division would say to me, 'just keep telling everybody it's all connected'. So that's what I did. It is all connected. These stories are all there. Now, is it ironic that five years after I left, that as though they're Indiana Jones and they found these stories that nobody ever thought of? When I was there, when they would say to us, 'we're never going to make these stories'. And now they're making the stories. Because at the end of the day, it's not about the stories. It's about the writing. It's about the actors. It's about having someone who believed in what it was that we were doing."
Loeb signed off by also highlighting some of the folk that helped the Marvel Netflix projects reach the heights they did, including stars like Charlie Cox, Vincent D'Onofrio, Krysten Ritter, Mike Colter, and Jon Bernthal, each of whom have either debuted in the MCU in recent TV series or are rumoured to do so in the upcoming second season of Daredevil: Born Again. Loeb concludes: "They're still friends. And I still care about them enormously."
