Yahoo News What's going on with Marvel's planned New Warriors TV show
Are you tired of watching moody superheroes punch each other in every corridor they can find? Do you think there's something inherently funny about people wearing their underwear on the outside while they fight crime? Or are you just looking for something new among all of the superhero stories now being told on screen?
Marvel had you covered as far back as 2016 when they announced development on New Warriors, the first superhero sitcom of its kind. Envisioned as a team of young wannabe Avengers, these New Warriors were set to star in their very own 30-minute comedy series led by Squirrel Girl, a girl with all the powers of... Well, a squirrel.
As nuts as that might sound – thank you – Doreen Green has defeated both Thanos and Doctor Doom single-handedly in the comics, so yeah, don't mess with Squirrel Girl.
The rest of the team were made up of various Marvel misfits including Speedball, a guy who bounces off stuff, and Mister Immortal, a hero who's too lazy to learn fighting skills because he literally has all the time in the world.
With the help of ABC Studios, Marvel started developing the sitcom as a ten-episode series for Freeform, but as any fan will tell you, we're yet to see any footage, and a new report from The GWW suggests New Warriors has now been cancelled before a single episode even aired.
So what happened to the New Warriors show?
At first, things looked promising for Squirrel Girl and Her Amazing Friends.
Comedian Milana Vayntrub was cast as the team's quasi-rodent leader and a pilot was shot with stars including Baby Daddy's Derek Theler as Mister Immortal and Dear White People alum Jeremy Tardy in the role of Night Thrasher.
Reports suggest that executives loved the pilot, something which actor Keith David confirmed during an interview with Comicbook.com. What he couldn't confirm unfortunately was why the success of that first episode didn't translate into a series pick-up:
"In this business, one never knows. I would hope that at some point it would come back. Everybody seemed to like it and loved the idea. Who knows why it hasn't come to fruition yet..."
Despite testing positively, there was apparently no room in Freeform's schedule for New Warriors, so it was then shopped out to other Disney-owned networks last year, all to no avail.
For reasons still unclear, both Hulu and Disney+ decided against picking up New Warriors on their respective platforms and hopes that ABC would step in to save the day sadly turned out to be unfounded.
Back when Roseanne was initially cancelled last year in the wake of controversy, the stars of New Warriors even campaigned ABC to consider their show as a replacement.
How about a show about a powerful computer scientist girl with one of the most diverse casts on TV and they all just want to make the world a better place? (Don’t mean to make this about me, buuuut the world needs this show.) https://t.co/fy5C5vLqYi
— Milana Vayntrub (@MintMilana) May 30, 2018
Things then went pretty quiet for a while until Marvel TV executive Jeph Loeb commented oh-so-briefly on the status of New Warriors during a Reddit AMA in June.
The words "We're working on it," didn't exactly inspire confidence among fans, especially when you bear in mind that New Warriors was supposed to premiere on Freeform almost an entire year earlier.
Because of this, it didn't come as much of a surprise when it was reported the show had been cancelled. But is that the whole story?
Was New Warriors really cancelled?
Fans hoping to see Disney+ save New Warriors are probably out of luck by now. The streamer has already scheduled a host of new shows, including quite a few Marvel superhero series, but so far, there's been no mention of Squirrel Girl whatsoever — or her squirrel friend Tippy-Toe for that matter either.
It seems likely then that New Warriors lost the fight before it even started, although it's strange that no official cancellation has been confirmed just yet. As far as we can tell, every report on the show's demise links back to that GWW article, but that site never confirmed its sources.
Wouldn't Marvel just go ahead and reveal New Warriors has been cancelled for certain if this news was genuine? After all, they weren't exactly shy about ending their relationship with Netflix when it came to shows like Daredevil and Jessica Jones.
This glimmer of hope probably won't amount to much. Enough time has passed to assume that New Warriors is indeed over, and it's not like Marvel can keep the cast on hand forever just in case a distributor does pick the show up.
Still, it's unfortunate to see something so promising fall into the depths of TV limbo. With all of the various superhero stories currently in development, we're still yet to see a full-blown superhero sitcom and this could have set New Warriors apart as something special.
Squirrel Girl in particular has become a popular role model for young girls following the success of her Eisner-winning comic book series, and it would have been inspiring to see a lesbian hero like Debrii star so prominently in a Marvel show too.
Unfortunately, the best we can probably hope for is a Squirrel Girl film starring Anna Kendrick, and even that seems pretty unlikely these days.
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