The critically-acclaimed Daredevil stood as Netflix’s fourth most popular show when it was recently canceled after three seasons. This led to a more shocking outcome than the nixing of Luke Cage and Iron Fist, both of which were subject to widespread criticism before falling off the streaming service’s priority list. This not only made folks wonder whether Marvel’s remaining titles, The Punisher and Jessica Jones, would also soon be on the chopping block, and whether a full-on Marvel exodus would soon be in the cards?
Further, neither Netflix nor Marvel has publicly revealed which entity decided to pull Daredevil, but one of the show’s actors claims that she knows. Amy Rutberg, who played Marci Stahl (the girlfriend of Foggy Nelson, one of Matt Murdock’s law partners), spoke with Inverse about how her “high up” Marvel contacts expressed shock at the development. To that effect, Rutberg says the cancellation decision was made by Netflix:
“My contacts at Marvel were very surprised. Any of the rumors that it was a Marvel decision are wrong, I think it was purely a Netflix decision. That comes from personal conversations with people high up at Marvel. They were surprised.”
This alleged Marvel surprise factor lends credence to a recent Variety report that detailed how these cancelled Marvel characters can’t appear in any non-Netflix project until 2020 or so, due to contract stipulations. That is to say, it’d be a strange business decision for Disney to pull the characters before that time (since they can’t appear on Disney’s streaming service for years), so it makes sense for this to solely be a Netflix call. Still, this doesn’t reveal much about Netflix’s overall business model for current and future programming, yet we may never know much about how those mysterious mechanisms work.
(Via Inverse)