No She-Hulk Season 2, Says Tatiana Maslany

Television

Jennifer Walters will have one more thing to complain about in her next drunken rant to her more famous cousin. During an appearance on a Twitch-streamed podcast called Codenames LIVE! – The New Class (which is unavailable, for some reason, but Total Film via GamesRadar has the rundown), She-Hulk: Attorney at Law star Tatiana Maslany said that a second season of the legal superhero comedy (such as it was any of those things) is almost certainly not happening. When asked about She-Hulk season 2, Maslany said, “I don’t think so. I think we blew our budget. And Disney was like, ‘No thanks.’” She-Hulk: Attorney at Law aired on Disney+ during the summer-fall of 2022 and was harder to endure than the extreme seasonal heat while wearing a parka.

She-Hulk ending isn’t all that surprising; outside of a contractual obligation, Marvel and Disney would have to be crazy to commission another season of a show that became a weekly joke, the epitome of everything wrong with the studio. Not only did She-Hulk have obnoxious, in-your-face sociopolitical messaging that denigrated heroes like the Hulk and Iron Man, not only were the special effects so atrocious that they encouraged the VFX artists to go public and defend themselves (before the show even aired!), but the writing was so bad you couldn’t even force yourself to enjoy it. Plots were held together with silly string, so much so that the finale simply stopped the narrative short and went for a meta-commentary on Marvel itself. The characters went beyond caricature to the point where they were just mouthpieces for whatever the writers were ranting about that week. Head writer Jessica Gao proudly admitted that she and her fellow writers had no idea how to craft a courtroom scene. And, as always nowadays, there was a contempt for the audience so raging that they turned “internet trolls” into the villains. Gee, I wonder why nobody liked it.

But Maslany’s point about the budget is probably a significant part of the show’s demise. Reports are that She-Hulk cost $25 million per episode to make, with the final tally being $225 million for nine episodes – and that’s just production costs. That’s less than Game of Thrones even in its final season, and Game of Thrones looked spectacular, especially compared to the they’ve-got-to-be-pranking-us production values of She-Hulk. Look at Daenerys’ dragons soaring in the sky and then look at She-Hulk walking down a hallway in a suit, and think about how the former cost much less to make than the latter. If anyone at Disney and Marvel had an ounce of shame left, they’d be embarrassed. I suppose this is a good sign for Marvel’s future projects, as much as anything can be; the cost of these failures does catch up with them eventually, and they can’t afford to keep a trainwreck like She-Hulk going indefinitely or even into a second season. Perhaps they’ll put a little more thought into the quality of their product in the future; it’s a long shot, but we’ll see.