It's Crystal Clear Why Marvel's She-Hulk Was A Flop

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]She-Hulk Attorney at Law hit Disney Plus with a lot of fanfare, but some fans rejected the show before it even started, and things only got worse from there.

[00:00:10]She-Hulk fell short with viewers. It's just a fact, and the numbers bear it out. A few weeks after the series August 2022 debut, Nielsen revealed its streaming ratings for the premiere week.

[00:00:20]She-Hulk wasn't in the top 10 at all.

[00:00:23]That may not sound too bad, but it does when you consider, as Game Rant pointed out, that every other Disney Plus Marvel show had cracked the top 10 before it.

[00:00:33]She-Hulk [music] did finally make it into the top 10 the following week, probably thanks to having an additional episode to stream. It entered the list at number nine >> [music] >> with 390 million minutes viewed. So, hey, it got into the top 10, but it still lagged compared to bigger shows.

[00:00:48]>> [music] >> Netflix's Echoes nearly tripled its total with more than a billion minutes viewed. Stranger Things got 890 million, and The Sandman snagged 681 million. The Direct also got numbers for some [music] HBO shows, which aren't included in the Nielsen streaming ratings, and found that House of the Dragon nearly doubled the She-Hulk total with 741 million. According to Game Rant, Marvel's [music] previous worst performer was Moon Knight with 418 million minutes viewed. That said, there has been some Marvel pushback [music] to the prevailing notion that She-Hulk underperformed. Brad Winderbaum, Marvel Studios head of streaming, television, and animation, said in an April 6th interview with The Escapist, I'll tell you this about She-Hulk. Yeah.

[00:01:33]That's one of our best performing shows.

[00:01:34]Whether that means She-Hulk performed better than the numbers that were published at the time or other Marvel shows did worse, it's hard to say for sure.

[00:01:42]One of the most consistent complaints about She-Hulk Attorney at Law involved the special effects. Lots of folks, even those who liked the show, agreed that the CGI animation looked cheap and [music] rushed, which was unfortunate since the title character was entirely a CGI creation in her hotel form. For a show like this is that we have a CG lead and that has never been done in a Marvel television show before because it's a little crazy. [music] The Independent's Louis Chilton described the pilot episode fight between the Hulk and She-Hulk as an ugly blur [music] of weightless, cheap-looking digital effects. It certainly didn't help that the show's pre-release trailers had what looked like to be unfinished special effects, leading to early judgments that all the CGI animation would look like that. The criticism got so loud that even before the series release, its cast and crew were playing defense on behalf of the special effects team. [music] Lead actress Tatiana Maslany said at the Television Critics Association's 2022 summer press tour, "I feel incredibly deferential to how talented these artists are and how quickly they have to work, obviously, in terms of like [music] churning these things out. It's probably unfair to compare the CGI from a TV production to what's possible in a far bigger budget film, but Marvel set a standard for itself and got blowback when it fell below it." All those special effects apparently were too expensive for TV, by the way. When asked about the possibility of a second season on a Twitch stream in January 2024, Maslany said, "I don't think so. I think we blew [music] our budget and Disney was like, 'No, thanks.'"

[00:03:14]I will answer your questions, but you must first transform back to Jennifer.

[00:03:19]Why?

[00:03:20]You are very expensive.

[00:03:22]While some fans clearly didn't make it there, others who actually watched the She-Hulk finale seemed to be turned off by its development. [music] The episode found Jennifer Walters cutting off a climactic fight in the middle and going to Marvel Studios production facilities to confront the artificial intelligence who oversees it all, named Kevin.

[00:03:38][music] She essentially gets the show's writers to rework her own story while she's in it. This can't possibly be where the season was going.

[00:03:47]Some fans thought that was too much. One wrote on Reddit, "As much as I enjoyed all the meta stuff, I was kind of disappointed that the final climax was a show going full meta. Like, I actually wanted to see her argue that big case in court."

[00:04:01]For a show with Attorney at Law as its subtitle, surprisingly little of She-Hulk takes place in a courtroom.

[00:04:06][music] That took a lot of viewers by surprise, and not in a good way. One wrote on Reddit, "I think it would have been better if they didn't have an overarching story and just focus on the superpowered court case of the week.

[00:04:18]Basically, like Harley Quinn with Marvel characters." Apparently, showrunner Jessica Gao had big plans for more court scenes, with one case, the trial of the Abomination, [music] originally meant to span multiple episodes. "That all changed in the writers' room, though," Gao told Variety. "One thing that we all realized very slowly was none of us are that adept at writing, you know, rousing trial scenes. That's clearly a problem when you're writing a TV series about a lawyer. Undoubtedly, there was a hill to climb for She-Hulk to differentiate itself from the series [music] about Marvel's other superpowered lawyer, Daredevil. She-Hulk largely just chose to opt out of the courtroom parts [music] altogether, and that led to confusion and disappointment from fans hoping to get more trial-based hijinks than twerking with Megan Thee Stallion in the office.

[00:05:05]At least some fans found that She-Hulk was a little unfair to Jen Walters' cousin, Bruce Banner. A big chunk of the first episode is dedicated to Bruce trying to help Jen [music] tame her inner Hulk, which has been unleashed thanks to her accidentally coming into contact with some of Bruce's irradiated blood. Some viewers didn't love that Jen contended in those exchanges that her life was harder than her cousin's. I'm an expert at controlling [music] my anger because I do it infinitely more than you. It's not too far a move from America Ferrera's largely well-received speech the following year in Barbie.

[00:05:38]But not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.

[00:05:43]So, what's the difference? Well, using Bruce Banner as a point of contrast [music] just didn't hit the mark for a lot of fans. That's one guy who has absolutely been through the wringer and has only had some comfort in his life since Endgame.

[00:05:55]There is another factor we have to mention, and it's one the show itself attempted to get ahead of to mixed results. In the weeks leading up to the release of She-Hulk, it became yet another battlefield in the culture war.

[00:06:06]She-Hulk had been around in the comics for over 40 years by that point, but a vocal group of Marvel faithful saw the choice to base the show on her as another example of pandering to people who weren't the true fans. Undoubtedly, quite a few of those fans review bombed the show on Rotten Tomatoes and elsewhere, then sat it out. But the show seemed to anticipate this [music] to mixed results. Among the fans who did watch the show, some thought that the writers' choice to make the season's villain stand-ins for real-life online trolls, predicting some of the response to the show, was too heavy-handed.

[00:06:39]2022 was not a particularly great year for Marvel. 3 years after the high watermark of Avengers Endgame, fans were feeling like the phase four of multiverse saga was largely directionless and flailing around to find something to cling onto. The films were financially successful, but led to fan disappointment. Think Thor: Love and Thunder.

[00:06:59]What a classic THOR ADVENTURE.

[00:07:01]HOORAH!

[00:07:03]THERE was also just a lot of stuff to keep up with. In addition to the three MCU movies of the year, there were also three TV series: Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, and She-Hulk. With that in mind, it's entirely reasonable to view She-Hulk within a framework of rapidly falling consumer trust in the Marvel [music] brand. Maybe if fans didn't already feel burned by other offerings, they would have given She-Hulk more of a chance. When many saw the early trailers, [music] it was over before it even really started.

[00:07:31]Not only does it look like budgetary factors will mean the first season She-Hulk will be the complete series, but there are clues that Maslany may be done with the role. The actress, who's plenty busy with other projects, has been very forthcoming about the emotional toll the fan backlash to the series and her portrayal of Jen took on her. There's so many more interesting things that I can like look to than a sort of vitriolic fan response. Maslany has also taken some public shots at Disney, specifically for ABC's temporary firing of late night host Jimmy [music] Kimmel. She even encouraged her Instagram followers to cancel their Disney Plus subscriptions. None of that definitively confirms that Maslany won't play She-Hulk again. After all, some of her Marvel co-stars were also critical of the Kimmel suspension, including Mark Ruffalo and Pedro Pascal. But it also doesn't speak to a pristine working relationship. These factors have led to rumors that Marvel may have to recast Jen Walters. When asked about it, Maslany pleaded ignorance. I don't know.

[00:08:31]Do you know? I don't know. That's why I'm asking you. I don't know. I don't know.

[00:08:35]But wait, isn't the show basically canceled? [music] Seemingly so, but that doesn't mean there aren't any more plans for She-Hulk. Some concept art for either Avengers Secret Wars, posted and then deleted by artist Mashk Rizvi, shows She-Hulk alongside the Hulk and his son Skaar. Everyone else in the image is also hulked out, indicating that it's taking place in the region of Doctor Doom's Battleworld known as Greenland. Curiously, She-Hulk looks like Maslany's version of the character in the concept art. Perhaps Marvel thought they still had her locked down for the role when it was made. That's far less clear now. In the event that she still appears in the movie, and if someone else plays her, [music] we'll surely be interested to see whether fans feel differently about the MCU She-Hulk in a different context.