Marvel Just Quietly Canceled Several TV Shows — Here's Why That's Good
Quality over quantity.
The Marvel machine is a perpetual motion machine. New films and shows are always in development, and aside from a few blips, Marvel’s release schedule has been suitably busy. For a time, that was just fine for Marvel fans, but as the MCU got bigger and more bloated, the Marvel brass slowly shifted to a “quality over quantity” approach. Now we can see that plan in action.
Marvel President Kevin Feige and Disney CEO Bob Iger have promised to scale back and focus more on storytelling for what’s felt like years. 2024 brought the first evidence of that approach, with only one MCU film hitting theaters. But it’s taken even longer for Marvel to implement its new strategy on the small screen. 2025 will actually be a big year for streaming: six shows are set to premiere on Disney+, and countless more are in development. But Marvel is still looking to trim the fat, and streaming offers plenty of targets.
Marvel has abandoned a Doctor Strange spinoff show called Strange Academy.
Per Deadline, Marvel has shelved three TV shows:
- Nova, a space-based crime procedural about the inner workings of the Nova Corps
- Strange Academy, based on the comic book series where Doctor Strange builds a school for magic in New Orleans
- Terror, Inc., about an anti-hero named Terror who can replace lost body parts with other people’s limbs and organs, acquiring their knowledge, memories, and emotions in the process
The studio’s decision to pause production is reportedly two-fold; Deadline cites a shift in priorities and a new TV development strategy. Marvel has been rethinking its entire approach to television, pivoting from the habits of the streaming era to embrace a more traditional approach.
Marvel’s television branch once operated more like a movie studio, ordering entire seasons and shooting episodes all at once, but that strategy caused headaches with Daredevil: Born Again. While several episodes had already been shot, they failed to strike the right tone, forcing Marvel to overhaul the show and start from scratch. Since then, Marvel has opted for a model akin to the classic pilot system, where one episode is made and reviewed before the entire season can be greenlit.
“We’re trying to marry the Marvel culture with the traditional television culture,” Brad Winderbaum, Marvel’s head of streaming, told The Hollywood Reporter in 2023. “It comes down to, ‘How can we tell stories in television that honor what’s so great about the source material?’”
Terror, Inc. would have pushed the MCU in a darker, but probably unnecessary, direction.
Apparently, not every story fits that culture, and while the canceled shows sound intriguing, they’re hardly essential to the MCU’s larger story. None had been officially greenlit, though Nova did have a showrunner in Ed Bernero (Criminal Minds). The rest were likely stuck in development without a clear path forward, and with so many other projects in the pipeline, Marvel had to make way for the stories that will keep the MCU afloat.
That said, not all hope is lost. There’s a chance the studio could circle back to these ideas eventually (particularly Nova, as the Nova Corps already has a presence in the MCU). Time will tell, but at least Marvel is starting to think harder about the franchise’s future instead of just chucking forgettable mediocre show after forgettable mediocre show onto Disney+.
