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A lot has been made about the quiet and cowardly removal of Marvel’s Runaways from Disney Plus and Hulu, in the midst of the platform’s major purge of content in the name of cost cuts. While Runaways is luckily still available for purchase on platforms like iTunes, everyone, whether they loved the show or not, can easily understand why complicating its access is disheartening.
Disney should know better than to undermine the work of so many dedicated people like this, but the root cause of why Runaways was one of the many titles on the list to be expunged is not internal to the platform. The show, which originally aired on Hulu, was never given a proper chance by Marvel fans. Even after it migrated from its fairly smaller original home to the streaming giant that is Disney Plus, fans of the superhero genre – a huge portion of its subscribers – still chose to ignore it.
Runaways came out at a time when Marvel television was struggling to pull in and engage the movie audience. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was massively popular in its first seasons but as it distanced itself from the main continuity of the MCU, viewers were no longer interested. Like Runaways, two other fantastic shows that were overlooked by those who call themselves Marvel fans were Cloak & Dagger and Agent Carter. At the time, I was obsessed with all four of these shows and found their characters to be a lot better than what I was seeing in the films. Not only did we get more time to develop storylines and character arcs, but they were also genuinely better written, more interesting, and with backstories that were far more grounded, consequently making the stakes much higher.
Meanwhile, the Marvel shows on Netflix were getting some traction. Mainly the near-perfect Daredevil, which rose to the occasion of adapting such a beloved character from the comics. They were attractive to a subsection of the fandom, which craved the grittier, darker world of street vigilantism that the movies couldn’t offer.
However, I dare say the target audience for the MCU was much more aligned with teen shows like Runaways and Cloak & Dagger and spy/sci-fi dramas like AoS and Agent Carter than the Netflix titles. Like the films, these shows balanced the synthetic aesthetic from the comics, with good, traditional superhero storytelling. Maybe it was oversaturation, and people watching (and loving) the films felt satisfied enough to not go looking for more of the same. Still, the stark difference in viewership between those shows and newer projects like Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk tells us a different story.
Although Infinity War and Endgame grew the Marvel fandom exponentially, by the time Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk came out, super-hero fatigue was at its highest expression – yet these shows were watched, and even hate-watched, by a lot of people, who could have just well been clicking on Runaways instead. WandaVision, Loki, and The Falcon and The Winter Soldier can’t compare because they bank on characters that the general audience already knows from the films, but the two previously mentioned productions served as the introduction of relatively obscure characters from the comics – just like Runaways and Cloak and Dagger.
Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk have over 10 thousand audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, while each season of Runaways only made it to a thousand (season 3 dipped further down to a hundred ratings). Now that the show is gone from Disney Plus, those who have enjoyed Ms. Marvel will probably never get to watch another equally heartfelt and action-packed teenage superhero show. Those who hated She-Hulk, and begged and whined for an alternative, will likely never get to watch a show that successfully mixed lighthearted character tropes with deeply important, and sometimes properly disturbing themes.
Last, but not least, it’s not lost on me that the Marvel audience turned its back on a show with an actually diverse cast long before that became the norm for the franchise, which centered — and a lot of the times revolved around — a beautiful LGBTQ+ relationship between two women.
Take this as your sign to rent Runaways on iTunes or your platform of choice. If you don’t want to spend the extra money, Cloak & Dagger is still streaming on Disney Plus for the time being and hopefully permanently.
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