‘She-Hulk’ Was Denied the Use of Some Marvel Characters

With She-Hulk on the way shortly on Disney+, fans are speculating about which other heroes and villains will make appearances. That being said, a few of them are completely off the table. In some cases, rights issues get in the way. In others, we really don’t know exactly why they’re off limits. The best hint we’ve gotten is because it could potentially complicate where those specific characters are going in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

We do know that a few characters have confirmed cameos, such as Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk and Charlie Cox’s Daredevil. Other smaller characters like Wong and Abomination will show up from time to time as well. The fact that the show is a legal comedy rather than your usual action-packed adventure movie complicates matters a little bit though. What capacity will they show up in? Will they be in the middle of court battles? We’ll just have to wait and see.

The showrunner, Jessica Gao, recently spoke with The Direct to explain what’s off limits for the show and what’s not. She said:

There were a lot of characters from the comics– we wanted a lot of the comics for characters for fun situations where we could bring in like a character and think of like funny reasons why they would be in legal trouble. But there were a lot of characters that were from the comics that we couldn’t use either because of a rights issue, or there were a few times where it was because Marvel… all they would say is that they had other plans. And that’s all they would tell us.

She also explains that they couldn’t get their hands on one hero in specific, who would have been really fun to see in the show. She continued:

But I will say, the one MCU character that really bummed out a lot of the writers in our room that we couldn’t use was Spider-Man and anyone involved around– like in the Spider-Man universe. Because we had so many Spider-Man fans in the room.

Spider-Man, obviously, is shared in movies (and theoretically television) between Marvel and Sony. It’s likely that Marvel didn’t even attempt to get Spider-Man for the series given the tight leash Sony keeps the character on. Spider-Man: No Way Home also complicates things, because we really don’t know what the character’s future entails.

You can catch She-Hulk: Attorney At Law on Disney+ on August 18.

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