Remember that rumored Marvel civil war that was supposedly behind a corporate reshuffling a few months ago? It’s also the reason you probably won’t see hard-boiled whiskey enthusiast Jessica Jones, or her Netflix pals Daredevil and Luke Cage, in an Avengers film anytime soon. As Avengers: Infinity War co-director Anthony Russo told Brazilian fan site Super Interessante (translated by comicbookmovie.com) during a visit to the country’s Comic-Con, putting Marvel’s TV characters in its movies is a “complicated” proposition: “When we start to serialize the telling of stories it’s difficult. You have to have a lot of control and focus on the course of history. The films are controlled by a group led by Kevin Feige, so they function as a unit. Other products, even if they are from Marvel, are controlled by others.”
Fans have pointed to a potential divide between Marvel’s film and TV divisions as the reason the Netflix shows rarely* use the names of the Avengers — Jessica Jones calls the Hulk and Captain America “the big green guy” and “the flag-waver,” respectively — and Russo’s remarks seem to at least hint that one exists. The complicated relationship between the two branches of the empire, he says, “is a smaller scale version of the problem that exists when remembering that Fox holds the rights to some of Marvel’s most popular characters, as does Sony and others.” In other words, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a highly synchronized machine, with every part marching in lockstep with all the others; bringing in characters controlled by outsiders, even if they are fellow Marvel employees, may throw the grand work off balance. It’s all probably fine, but let us know if they all start wearing same-colored shirts.
* This post originally stated that Marvel’s Netflix shows do not use the names of the Avengers. In Daredevil, Foggy Nelson mentions Captain America by name.
