Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige is looking more and more like a problem similar to Kathleen Kennedy’s situation as Lucasfilm as he is now no longer overseeing a successful brand, but appears to be managing the decline of said successful brand.
Feige’s latest comments about She-Hulk: Attorney at Law prove this point.
The producer put his full support behind the series telling Entertainment Weekly, “She-Hulk, for example, was an experiment: ‘Let’s just do a legal comedy.’ What if Ally McBeal was a superhero? How do we do a legal sitcom with an incredibly expensive CG character in the middle of every episode? And I couldn’t be happier with the tone that Jessica Gao has set for that. It’s a very different tone than many of other projects have, and that was totally intentional.”
That tone was confirmed to be a “f*** you” to Marvel’s previous fans by She-Hulk actor Tatiana Maslany.
Speaking to Variety following the series’ finale, Maslany was asked by the outlet, “Were you expecting to face the trolls when you signed on for the show?”
She responded, “Reading the script, it was so true. There’s so much resistance to a woman just existing in that space of superheroes. There’s always going to be that. I sort of anticipated it.”
“It’s why I also feel it’s important. There’s such an entitlement to space held by certain people, and to even exist as She-Hulk is like a fuck-you, and I love that,” she added.
In response to another question about the finale tackling “some of the exact same trolling comments that Marvel fans have been making,” Maslany said, “Jessica Gao is a genius and knows about the culture we’re living in and her position in it when she’s writing these stories about a woman superhero. She knows what that response is going to be.”
“As a cast, it was delightful sending each other these troll responses, like ‘Oh my god, give them a week and then they’re going to literally see this pop up verbatim in the show and become the villains of the show.’ It was thrilling,” she told Variety.
Gao, for her part, also revealed the tone of the show was to troll people.
Variety asked her, “How did it feel to accurately predict what the trolls would be saying?” Gao replied, “Our writers room opened three years ago. The fact that we were able to predict what the reaction was going to be, what a lot of the trolling comments were going to be, really shows how very tired and unoriginal these trolls are.”
“That really tickled me because the little troll that lives inside of me really loves trolling the trolls,” she declared.
The series’ director Kat Coiro also told Variety, “One thing I noticed is that at the beginning of the series, I was getting a lot of nasty, mean comments. As it’s gone forward, that has stopped. I think it’s because now they realize when they target us, they’re playing directly into our hands.”
“And we called it, which is pretty gratifying. It’s so satisfying. Even negative commentary, I always interpret as engagement. If people are that angry, they are paying attention. I look at all of it as positive.
Interestingly, she claims negative commentary is engagement, but previously noted it stopped. That probably has to do with the fact that the people who initially watched the show quickly tuned out as Nielsen ratings indicated the series’ viewership significantly declined the more episodes were released.
In fact the series didn’t even have that much of an audience to begin with as it did not break into Nielsen’s Top 10 Original Programs streaming chart for the week of August 15 to 21, 2022. The first episode debuted on Disney+ on August 18, 2022.
By the week of September 19 to 25, 2022 when the series’ sixth episode debuted on Disney+ it still did not make Nielsen’s Top 10 Original Programs streaming chart.
Its viewership was somewhere below 416 million minutes viewed, which was what Stranger Things, the tenth ranked series on the chart for that week, raked in.
The series did eventually make the charts when it was available to binge following its finale during the week of October 10 to 16, 2022.
However, despite being available to binge the series only garnered 526 million minutes viewed, which was good for 5th on Nielsen’s Top 10 Original Streaming chart.
The series had once again dropped off Nielsen’s Top 10 Original Programs streaming chart the next week. And it fell by a significant margin as it failed to even garner 398 million minutes viewed, amount of time viewed by 10th ranked The Handmaid’s Tale.
That means the series’ viewership dropped by at least 128 million minutes. That’s at least a 24% drop within a week.
What do you make of Feige putting his full support behind the disastrous tone of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law that made a point to insult previous Marvel fans?