4 Years in, Marvel Has Discovered the Secret to Television: Yearly Series

Marvel Studios has had a bit of an up-and-down success story when it comes to TV since WandaVision kicked off a renewed focus on streaming series back in 2021. Well, it might be more diplomatic to frame them loosely as TV for the most part—the studio’s whole approach to miniseries that were more like sliced up movies left us with, for the most part, a kind of mixed bag. Some great (Loki, the aforementioned WandaVision, more recent fare like Agatha All Along and X-Men ’97), some middling (Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Moon Knight, Hawkeye), and some perhaps better consigned to the trash heaps of history and never uttered about again (looking at you and your ghastly AI generated opening titles, Secret Invasion).

But after a bit of an existential crisis a couple of years ago, it decided to not only completely retool the entirety of Daredevil: Born Again, a show (arguably one of Marvel’s biggest and most anticipated) it had already been filming and developing for months, but also fundamentally pivot its entire approach to making TV. And now, in a shocking move that will no doubt shake the very foundations of the industry as we know it, the House of Ideas and one-time seemingly unstoppable Hollywood tastemaker has learned a bold lesson: audiences like it when a TV show has multiple seasons that come out on a yearly basis.

In the run up to the long-anticipated release of Daredevil: Born Again next week, Marvel’s head of TV Brad Winderbaum has been running the press circuits offering a whole host of updates on the studios’ TV prospects. Earlier this week, while saying that Moon Knight likely won’t return for a second season as the hero’s show was made in that pre-realignment era, the executive frankly stated to Comicbook.com that “moving forward our priorities have shifted… we’re making shows as shows that can exist as annual releases, more like television.” Which, again, is a hilarious thing to say when you’ve purportedly made over 15 seasons of “television” in the last four years. But it’s something Winderbaum has re-iterated for multiple series in recent times, whether it be live-action prospects like Daredevil, or, as stated today, animated series like Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man and X-Men ’97.

Although both of those shows will have to wait more than a year’s gap before their sophomore seasons, due to the understandable circumstances that animation takes more time. “We will have a Spider-Man season every year if I have anything to say about it,” Winderbaum told Collider in a new interview. “What usually happens, as you know, in animation, is that there’s a bigger gap between season one and season two than in subsequent seasons, and that’ll be similar in Friendly. We will have to wait a little bit more than a year for season two, but then after that, it should come out on an annual cadence, hopefully.” The producer similarly acknowledged likewise in a separate Collider piece for X-Men ’97, while clarifying that that show’s own second season will definitely be airing in 2026, rather than 2025.

While it is very fun—and arguably quite fair—to poke at Marvel for taking so long to learn this lesson, at least it’s seemingly finally learning it. Taking any longer might have been even more embarrassing—but hopefully we’ll be seeing the fruits of this pivot to actually trying to make television when Daredevil: Born Again starts streaming on Disney+ on March 4.

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