Series star Tatiana Maslany has cast doubt on the chances of a She-Hulk season 2. “I think we blew our budget,” she says. Curiously, the stream on which she said this has vanished from the web.
Premiering in August 2022, She-Hulk: Attorney At Law landed amid a rush of MCU television shows commissioned for Disney+, with Moon Knight and Ms Marvel also emerging on the platform that same year.
As Bob Iger has talked about focusing on ‘quality over quantity’ following a turbulent year for Disney at large, however, it now sounds as though a second season of the legal drama and superhero mash-up won’t happen.
On the intricately-titled Codenames LIVE! – The New Class comedy show on Twitch (as picked up by Deadline), Maslany was asked directly whether a second season of She-Hulk would one day emerge. Maslany’s response was a simple, “I don’t think so.”
“I think we blew our budget,” Maslany added, “and Disney was like, ‘No thanks’.”
That may be a reference to how much each episode of She-Hulk was reported to have cost to make – around $25m, according to a 2023 report, with the nine-episode mini-series as a whole costing Disney something in the region of $225m.
Then again, Marvel’s effects-heavy TV shows are generally expensive to produce; Secret Invasion, the series which came after She-Hulk on Disney+, cost a total of $212m – more than double the reported sums spent on the likes of Barbie, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse. Executives at Disney will likely have noted that those three films were the biggest box office successes of 2023, and not straight-to-streaming TV shows.
Little wonder, then, that Disney – now back under the watch of returning CEO Bob Iger – is making fewer shows and on smaller budgets. The recently-launched Echo, for example, reportedly cost $40m for its entire five-episode run.
Ominously, the episode featuring Tatiana Maslany no longer appears to be available online – in fact, host Tim Riel’s entire channel appears to have vanished from Twitch. It isn’t clear whether the episode was pulled because of Maslany’s comments, or whether its unavailability is simply a coincidence. We’ll do a bit of digging and update you as we learn more.
