Posted in: Hulu, Marvel Studios, Movies, TV | Tagged: HRL, hulu, marvel, runaways, tv

Runaways Season 1: Why It Took So Long To Make It To The Small Screen

Runaways has finally made it to the small screen, but it's been a long journey. Jeph Loeb admits to The Tracking Board ever since Marvel started a TV division Runaways has been one of the most requested shows they make.

"Television now has a voice, which is very different form the movies," Loeb told Tracking Board ahead of the premiere of the Hulu superhero series. "Our audience has become sophisticated enough that they can say, 'that works really well as a television show, I don't know that that would work as a movie,' and if you go back and look at any of the articles form that time, within the top five, there was always Runaways. It was always in there. There was no choice about it, it was something we wanted to do."

Runaways, while popular with fans, is a bit on the weird side. It's a good property, but not exactly something you can lead with.

"We didn't know if it was something we wanted to do right out of the gate, largely because it is such a young cast," Loeb said. "How do you tell that story and get the audience comfortable with superpowered people in the real world? Do we want to start out with young heroes? And I think the answer was, let's see whether or not we can get the adult heroes up, before we go into the young world. So it was really about a year ago that we started looking at the landscape [for bringing in Runaways]. Some of that was about knowing that Spider-Man Homecoming was going to come out and he's a young hero, and some of it was there are networks out there that do cater to a younger audience. How do we get into business with them? How do we tell the best story that we could?"

When looking for showrunners, Loeb decided to look for people who weren't comic book fans and ended up with Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, who worked on Gossip Girl and The O.C..

"They don't look at it as a superhero show, they look at it as a teen drama," Loeb said. "Which is something they're very comfortable with, having done The OC and having done Gossip Girl. So their learning curve was, instead of breaking down and going into your room and slamming the door on your parents, why not pick up a car and throw it? That's not something that happens on the show but it's a metaphor for, how do you take the things that happen in the Marvel universe and put them through the prism in order to make reality out of it?"

It an interesting way to approach the series. While the superhero part is very important, it's not the only thing that's happening in the series.

Summary: After discovering their parents are super-villains in disguise, a group of teenagers band together to run away from their homes in order to atone for their parents' actions and to discover the secrets of their origins.

Marvel's Runaways, created by Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz, stars Gregg Sulkin, Ariela Barer, Lyrica Okano, Allegra Acosta, Virginia Gardner, and Rhenzy Feliz. It is streaming to Hulu now.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!