In summer 2022, Bruce Banner’s cousin Jennifer Walters scored the MCU spotlight for herself in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, one of the many Marvel TV shows that can be streamed with a Disney+ subscription. Critically-speaking, the Tatiana Maslany-led series was received decently, but it certainly didn’t escape critique, particularly for its visual effects. Well, according to Marvel insiders, there were larger issues at play with She-Hulk, including $25 million episodes and “half baked scripts.”
Within a Variety story that also covered how Marvel Studios is reportedly interested in bringing back dead characters like Iron Man, the insiders stated that both She-Hulk: Attorney at Law and WandaVision found themselves so log jammed on VFX work that final effects were added in after these shows had already premiered on Disney+. However, regarding the former series, some of these “inside sources” claim that Victoria Alonso, the Marvel Studios executive whom was fired from the company last year, was used as a “scapegoat” for She-Hulk’s issues, when the real culprit was actually “a lack of oversight on script development,” which then led to problems on the VFX side of things. According to one unnamed individual:
The so-called bad VFX we see was because of half-baked scripts. That is not Victoria. That is Kevin. And even above Kevin. Those issues should be addressed in preproduction. The timeline is not allowing the Marvel executives to sit with the material.
One of the examples listed is how when She-Hulk: Attorney at Law was originally conceived, viewers wouldn’t have seen the first time Jennifer Walters transformed into her emerald self until a flashback in Episode 8, i.e. the penultimate one. However, after “Marvel’s brain trust” watched footage, they decided that Jennifer’s first transformation needed to happen in the pilot episode instead so that viewers would see more of her backstory early on, thus necessitating that the VFX team scramble to fulfill this demand in postproduction.
Additionally, it’s mentioned in the article that a single episode of She-Hulk would cost around $25 million, the same price that an episode from Game of Thrones’ final season would fetch. Yet despite so much money being poured in, when She-Hulk finally premiered at the El Capitan Theatre in August 2022, the special effects were out of focus in multiple scenes. Still, it’s not the only MCU project to deal with VFX issues, as shortly after Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’s release in February, it was said that the threequel’s own problems on that front were due to resources being taken from there and diverted to Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
Again, it’s not like She-Hulk: Attorney at Law was critically maligned; it has its fair share of fans, including CinemaBlend’s own Rich Knight calling it the best MCU show. That said, going off this information, clearly the postproduction portion of the creative process was far from a smooth ride. As for Jennifer Walters’ future in the MCU, that hasn’t been officially clarified yet, as She-Hulk hasn’t been renewed for a second season, nor has Marvel Studios announced when or even if we’ll see her next. Unofficially, however, Mark Ruffalo, one of this franchise’s most notorious spoilers, indicated he’s heard that Maslany will be brought back in one of the upcoming Avengers movies, if not both The Kang Dynasty and Secret Wars.
Should that tidbit of information be confirmed, we’ll obviously let you know about it. For now, the MCU’s Disney+ output is chugging along with the final episodes of Loki Season 2, and the entirety of Echo will follow on a yet-to-be-announced date sometime in January. The Marvels is next on the upcoming Marvel movies slate, arriving on November 10.
