Wonder Man is toast. Marvel cancels Disney Plus series after one season.
Disney+ reversed the Season 2 renewal it announced in March and axed Wonder Man, a Hollywood satire with a 91% Rotten Tomatoes score and an Emmy-nominated lead. It was one of the best things Marvel has made in years. It also barely rated, and that’s the number that ended up mattering.
So Marvel finally made a Disney+ show critics genuinely loved, gave the lead an Emmy nomination, renewed it for a second season, and then killed it four months later.
What happened
On July 30, Disney+ canceled Wonder Man, the showbiz satire with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as a struggling actor named Simon Williams and Ben Kingsley back as Trevor Slattery from Iron Man 3. Variety had it first, and the rest of the trades confirmed it inside an hour.
What makes it sting is the timing. Marvel announced a Season 2 renewal in March. Ten days ago, director Destin Daniel Cretton was out doing Spider-Man: Brand New Day press and casually mentioning he hoped to start shooting that second season this year.
Then showrunner Andrew Guest was posting “Marvel has cancelled Wonder Man” on Instagram. The guys who made the thing were apparently as blindsided as anyone.
The renewal was basically fake
And here’s where it gets weird. That renewal Marvel made a whole announcement about? There was nothing behind it.
Per Variety, the Season 2 writers’ room never opened. The writers got released to go find other jobs. Which means the one step you absolutely have to take to make a season of television, paying someone to write it, just never happened. Marvel put out a press release, attached two returning actors to it, and left the rest blank.
So they didn’t really reverse a decision. They cancelled a thing that was never much more than a headline in the first place. The renewal was the strange part. The cancellation just made Wonder Man look like every other Marvel show on the service.
The reviews were great. The audience wasn’t there.
This is the frustrating bit, because by every measure that isn’t ratings, the show worked.
It’s sitting at 91% on Rotten Tomatoes. Abdul-Mateen picked up an Emmy nod for lead comedy actor, which made him the only live-action guy ever nominated for both a Marvel and a DC thing, on top of his old Watchmen win. Critics kept calling it the freshest swing Marvel had taken in ages.
Then you look at the viewership and wince. Wonder Man dropped all eight episodes on January 27, pulled 618 million minutes its first week, hit No. 8 on Nielsen, and that was it. That was the high point.
Off the chart the next week, never seen again.
One week on the board, total. The crowd it did get skewed older too, 41% in the 35-to-49 range, and Disney never put out official numbers, which they tend not to do when the numbers aren’t a brag.
Watch what they did with it
The tell wasn’t the announcement. It was the handling.
Once the ratings sagged, Disney reportedly stuck the first episode up on YouTube for free, then loaned the whole show to Hulu for a bit to go fishing for the audience Disney+ hadn’t found. You don’t give a series away like that while you’re gearing up to order eight more episodes of it. That’s salvage. That’s a studio quietly deciding a thing is over while its own press release still says otherwise.
It’s an A-lister club now
Pull back and look at the graveyard. After this, the only live-action Marvel shows that ever got a second season are Loki and Daredevil: Born Again. That’s the whole list. WandaVision, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, Echo, Ironheart, one and done, all of them.
Now clock what the two survivors have in common. Loki’s a fan-favorite played by a movie star. Daredevil’s one of the most beloved characters Marvel owns. Big names, both. Wonder Man was a deep-cut nobody-character in a smart little comedy about Hollywood, which is exactly the kind of show that earns rave reviews and a modest, graying audience. Turns out that’s a death sentence on Disney+ right now.
So is this the “quality over quantity” pivot?
Kind of the opposite, honestly, and Wonder Man is the evidence.
Yes, Marvel’s making fewer shows. Kevin Feige has said as much, fewer and bigger after years of dumping content onto the service. But you can’t call this “quality over quantity” when the thing they just axed was the quality. It reviewed better than almost anything else they’ve got, and it’s the one that died, while flashier stuff with bigger names keeps landing movies and spinoffs.
What’s really going on is colder than that. Marvel’s done paying for well-reviewed experiments that don’t move the needle, and it’s circling the wagons around the handful of characters famous enough to guarantee a crowd. Good reviews are a nice thing to have. They don’t get you a second season. Numbers do, and the big names bring the numbers.
Abdul-Mateen still gets to go to the Emmys. He’ll sit there nominated for a show that doesn’t exist anymore, and that’s about the most Hollywood ending a Hollywood satire could’ve gotten.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Variety — first reporting of the cancellation, the never-opened writers’ room, the March renewal reversal, and the one-week Nielsen run
The Hollywood Reporter — the single-season Marvel TV pattern, the Loki and Daredevil: Born Again exceptions, and the production credits
The Independent / AOL — the 91% Rotten Tomatoes score, Abdul-Mateen’s Emmy nomination, and the soft viewership
ComicBookMovie / Hollywood Life — Andrew Guest’s and Abdul-Mateen’s statements and Cretton’s July 20 Season 2 comments
Cosmic Book News — the older-skewing demographic and the reported free-episode and Hulu salvage moves