It's Been A Long Time Coming For The Defenders

Long before Marvel and Netflix planned The Defenders, nobody knew just how big the first season of Daredevil would be. Arguably the best Marvel-Netflix show to date, Charlie Cox’s performance put Marvel TV in high demand. Next came Jessica Jones, then another season of Daredevil, then Iron Fist, then Luke Cage, and in 16 days we will see the release for The Defenders. But was this Marvel’s plan for their Netflix lineup all along? And how detailed was it supposed to be?

Player.One spoke with showrunner Marco Ramirez at San Diego Comic-Con and he confirmed there are elements of The Defenders that have been in the works for years. He estimates before 2015.

"I have been on these projects since Daredevil Season 1. I was there the first day the writers’ room was meeting and I just remember we were spitballing a bunch of big ideas. One of them was particularly big and Jeph Loeb was in the room and he said, ‘Things like that, that’s probably Defenders.’” Ramirez told Player.One. “Along the way there have been some specific areas we have seen but not investigated in each of these shows and that’s all been very deliberate in Jeph’s mind.”

READ: Breaking Down The Villains Of The Defenders

Of course, this added to the pressure already building up on The Defenders. The stakes are so high and fans are waiting for the culmination of plots running through Daredevil and Iron Fist, in particular, because of The Hand. We first met Madame Gao in Daredevil, who was working with Wilson Fisk and Nobu. Gao appears in Iron Fist as well, alongside Bakuto, another Hand affiliate. When Claire Temple quits her job at Metro-General in Daredevil, it’s because of The Hand. This in turn causes her to move back to Harlem and meet Luke Cage. Of course, viewers already know Luke Cage from Jessica Jones. And in The Defenders, we’ll meet Sigourney Weaver’s character, who seems to be the leader of The Hand. We asked with all these threads finally coming together if the process was overwhelming.

“Yes. 100 percent, yeah,” Ramirez said. “It was massive, knowing that it’s based on a project Jeph took to Netflix years ago saying, ‘Look. What if we do this crazy thing?’ A lot of people have been betting on this for a while,” he said. “I grew up with comics in my backpack, not textbooks. So at the end of the day it was overwhelming, but these are just personal stories. The more we make it about these individual stories, the smaller a job it seems.”

Are you looking forward to see how these four heroes lives fit together? Let us know in the comments and make sure to check out our review of the first four episodes.