It’s always rough to see old friends and lovers go their separate ways, pulled apart by the drifting wind of circumstances and/or massive, politically charged clusterfucks. Take the MCU’s Daredevil and She-Hulk, for instance: He’s all in, with Disney’s presumably very hollow-eyed-at-this-point PR folks rolling out news today (via Deadline) that franchise revival Daredevil: Born Again has been preemptively renewed for a third season on Disney+. Meanwhile, she—or, to be clear, the performer who played her—is now actively calling for people to cancel their subscriptions to the service outright. Will these two ever be able to work things out?
So, yeah: The usually mighty Marvel marketing apparatus has run into a bit of stiff public wind today, with some of the calls coming from inside the House Of Ideas. The Born Again news should have been an easy slam dunk: Disney likes handing out these early renewals as a vote of confidence, in this case presumably hoping to paper over some of the messy vibes after Born Again needed a pretty major overhaul while it was filming its first season. (Not helped, recently, by star Charlie Cox saying he wasn’t sure if the show would be getting a third run.) A renewal, rolled out fully six months before the show’s second season is set to air, is pretty clearly meant to signal to everybody that all is well with the ground-level crimefighting series, and Disney is happy to stay in the Matt Murdock business for the foreseeable future.
So we can only imagine how frustrating it must be for said PR folks to see She-Hulk star Tatiana Maslany—who co-starred with Cox in an episode of her own streaming show, where the two legal eagles hooked up—posting a photo of herself to her Instagram Story today, showing her in her She-Hulk motion capture rig, and telling fans to cancel their Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN subscriptions. Maslany didn’t elaborate, but it’s fairly easy to assume she was responding to ABC’s decision to pull Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the schedule after the FCC and several affiliate owners targeted him for public ire on Wednesday. Maslany has never been a “keep quiet” type, with social media feeds frequently calling for aid and support for Palestine and other causes. (She was an original signer of the Film Workers For Palestine pledge that started circulating in Hollywood last week.) Still, it’s rare to see a Marvel actor (even one whose contributions were confined to a single fun, but not hugely memorable, streaming series) go quite this hard against the Disney machine. It mostly just seems emblematic of how blindsided the company has apparently been by the furor surrounding Kimmel, with its carefully planned reveals now being fed straight into the thresher of the current political moment.
