EXCLUSIVE: With ‘Daredevil’ on the Way, Here’s a Big MCU Update from Marvel’s Dan Buckley

The Marvel Cinematic Universe never sleeps.

The Agent Carter finale on ABC — more below on whether that was a season or a series finale — just wrapped up, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on ABC is back from its winter break, and Daredevil is be back on Netflix this Friday. And that’s just March. Captain America: Civil War will be in theaters in May, Doctor Strange will be in theaters in November, and several new TV projects are in the works for fall and winter.

We caught up recently with Dan Buckley, an executive producer on Daredevil and one of the keepers of the canon for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, to talk about Daredevil and some of Marvel’s other upcoming projects.

DECIDER: For Daredevil and Jessica Jones, were you looking at Netflix primarily for distribution reasons — no commercials, international markets, etc. — or was there something about the how you could make the shows that appealed to you about Netflix?

Dan Buckley: You know, it’s a little bit of both. We saw the SVOD business beginning to pop after we started making Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. at ABC, and we also saw that there was a certain creative freedom to a model like premium cable. We felt like we had a group of superheroes that would present in their best way on that kind of platform.

When you signed the multi-series deal with Netflix in 2013, did you know who the four lead characters were going to be?

Yeah, we announced then that it was going to be four shows built around the main characters — Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist — and then they would all be together in The Defenders series.

The first seasons of Daredevil and Jessica Jones were each built around a major villain. Is the idea of having a lead bad guy for each season a brand element for the Netflix shows?

That’s not something we’re telling our creators to do, but it’s a compelling creative approach. You get to know the villains on a very personal level — not just that they’re bad guys but how they got there. One of the tenets of what makes villains interesting in the Marvel Comics universe is that you don’t necessarily like what they’re doing but you understand it.

Rosario Dawson’s character is in the first season and the new season of Daredevil and is also in Jessica Jones. Is there much of an effort between Marvel and the showrunners to plan how much the shows will overlap?

In almost every format, Marvel storytelling has a lot of serialized cross-pollination. We want make the best effort to add to the experience for people who have already enjoyed some of our stories but not take away from the experience for people watching something for the first time.

The marketing for the Netflix shows is definitely more about the Hell’s Kitchen world than expanding on The Avengers’ world, but you’re putting Marvel in the title and making that direct connection.

The Guardians of the Galaxy movie did not cross over into The Avengers universe, but knowing that is was a Marvel movie brought in a lot of people who trusted in it because they like Marvel. The Netflix shows are connected to each other tonally and geographically, but we want to make sure that each season of each series can be enjoyed on its own.

The two major additions this season for Daredevil are Punisher and Elektra. What was the idea behind adding those two characters to the series?

Punisher is very much a darker reflection of Matt Murdock. Where is the moral line with being a vigilante, and does Matt cross that line? That’s what Frank — Punisher — offers to Daredevil, and Jon Bernthal has done a great job delivering it. Elektra is the other side of a personality triangle. What is it like to have the person around you who makes you enjoy crossing that line? Punisher and Elektra are very different characters and relate to different parts of the story for Matt Murdock, but the combination of both of them in his life at the same time offers a lot of very good questions.

Was the writers’ room mostly the same from Season 1 to Season 2?

It was a combination. Steven DeKnight didn’t return as showrunner, but Doug Petrie and Marco Ramirez both worked on Season 1 and were co-showrunners on Season 2. Tonally and texturally, this is very much the same Daredevil. Jeff Loeb is still an executive producer, and a lot of people from the Marvel world are connected to both shows. The cast is very much the same.

Is there a particular axis that the show operates on — strength vs. weakness or morality vs. immorality?

It’s very much about: What is the line? You see Matt in three forms. He is a lawyer, where justice is blind. His Roman Catholic moral center can play as Old Testament or New Testament. And he’s a guy who wants to deliver justice in a very physical, black-and-white way. How does he settle himself with those three things? How far is too far? He constantly questions himself because he always has those three things going on in his head.

Is the second season also about what happens to power in a vacuum? The end of Season 1 left this void of authority, and all these other forces start rushing into it at the beginning of Season 2.

That is part of it — and the personalities involved in it and how they react in that.

Are you finding in viewership data that Jessica Jones appeals to a lot of viewers who may not be interested in something like The Avengers movies?

We have a lot of people who read Spider-Man comics who don’t read Avengers comics. There will be people who enjoy Jessica Jones who may not be interested in The Avengers films. They’re very different things. For one things, we wouldn’t want 13- or 14-year-olds to watch Jessica Jones, and the movies are more of a family experience.

You would want Jessica Jones to be a gateway for Luke Cage because he has appeared on the show, but six seasons of Jessica Jones should make sense all by themselves.

Yep, exactly. Everyone has different tastes and different things they enjoy.

Will Luke Cage premiere sometime this fall?

I really can’t speak to the date. We’re very happy with where we are on the series, but I can’t get into the release date.

[Luke Cage star Mike Colter said over the weekend that the series will premiere on September 30.]

Is it finished or mostly finished?

We’re very close to wrapping production on it.

The next series after Luke Cage will be Iron Fist, and you just announced Finn Jones will play the lead. Tell me about that series.

Iron Fist’s name is Danny Rand. He’s a young man who travels with his father and mother into the Himalayas. The plane crashed, and he was the only survivor. He is rescued and taken to the world of K’un-L’un, which is a magical city in another dimension. He becomes Iron Fist and eventually comes back to New York. The Iron Fist and Luke Cage characters were created in the comics in the late 1970s and reflect what was going on in the cinema world — Luke Cage with blaxploitation and Iron Fist with kung fu movies.

Is Hell’s Kitchen a core element of the Netflix shows, or will you grow some characters away from that at some point?

We see New York City as a cast member, and it’s the reason we shoot the show in New York.

Are the Netflix shows canon to The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy and everything Marvel is doing?

Yes, definitely.

But the ABC shows won’t necessarily touch the films, the films won’t necessarily touch Netflix shows, etc.?

I don’t think there’s any hard-and-fast rule. We’ve been doing this type of storytelling for 50 years in the comics. It’s in the DNA of who we are. If the opportunities offer themselves creatively and commercially, then we could connect things together. The most important thing is that each thing that’s produced by Marvel is part of the whole.

I’m curious if there’s some effort to silo these brands where the Netflix shows talk to each other and the ABC shows talk to each other because you’re trying to grow sub-brands on these different networks.

Everything falls under the Marvel brand. We want to build a relationship with Netflix and maintain a tenor of what Netflix viewers want from those shows. And there’s a certain feel and tenor of the ABC shows and of the movies. We serve what the consumer wants to experience on those respective platforms.

ABC cast Hayley Atwell in a drama pilot that’s not related to Agent Carter. Is the idea that she would shoot that series around the next season of Agent Carter, or are you likely not going to do another season of that in the near term?

If we could do another season of Agent Carter, we would shoot it around that other series. We have not made a decision about that. We have done Agent Carter as 10-episode seasons, so it’s relatively easy to shoot around if we decided to do another season. That would be different if we were doing 22 or 24 episodes, but that was never the plan for Agent Carter.

What’s the status of FX’s Legion and ABC’s S.H.I.E.L.D. spinoff?

I can’t talk much about Legion. I know they’re going through casting, but I can’t say much yet about that. We’re very excited about Marvel’s Most Wanted. We just did a table read a couple of days ago that came out great, and we’re about to shoot the pilot.

Do you think of superhero shows or even the Marvel Cinematic Universe as its own genre at this point? Do you have any saturation concern?

A lot of people look at superheros as a genre. I think there’s plenty of room, and the marketplace hasn’t told us otherwise. As in every genre, the marketplace will tell you when it doesn’t like something. When something is good, you can generally find a market for it. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is as much an action/adventure show as a superhero drama. You could easily put Jessica Jones in the thriller/suspense genre as much as the superhero genre. Daredevil is as much a crime/noir show as a superhero show. These Marvel characters tend to be superheroes, but we are still delivering other genres of storytelling.

Has the success of some of the more recent films and shows emboldened Marvel to move further away from star characters like Iron Man and Captain America?

When the did the slate of Marvel characters for Netflix, I read the articles about “Marvel brings on the B-team.” It’s easier to launch characters that have a strong publishing history like Spider-Man and The Avengers because they have a larger built-in base, but I’ll be very clear that that doesn’t make us emboldened. Luke Cage and Iron Fist have a bigger awareness than many shows that start from scratch because they’ve been around since the 1970s. If we get really really phenomenal people to work with us who can tell compelling stories, we feel confident that talent and storytelling will allow us to deliver things that people will watch.

Guardians of the Galaxy was probably a bigger risk on the front end than what it looks like now.

Yeah, in a lot of ways it was. Frankly, though, we were very confident all through the ride on Guardians.

I don’t mean the quality of the film as much as the marketability of a much lesser known product.

Luke Cage, Iron Fist and Daredevil had a lot more publishing awareness and success than Guardians has had. The original Guardians was published in 1969 and pretty much wasn’t seen until the ’90s. The team in the Guardians movie didn’t appear in the comics until 2006.

You’re at a point now, though, where you wouldn’t necessarily have to recast a major Avengers character, would you?

I think the better way of saying that it is that we have a lot of confidence in our characters and are very proud of our library. We appreciate everything that everyone has brought to the table with those characters.

How seriously are you looking at stories from the comics like moving to a new Hulk a new Thor?

I can’t speak for the studio, but the beauty of publishing the comics is that we often go back there to look at stuff. We have 70 books a month coming out that we can use for inspiration.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider. He is also a contributing writer for Signature and The Daily Beast. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.