This week brought some news that caught my attention in a good way. It looks like the Punisher is coming back as the Punisher was always meant to be. From what I have read, the studio and Jon Bernthal had serious creative differences at some point, and when they came back to him wanting to revive the character, he reportedly held his ground. He did not see the version of Frank Castle they were pitching, felt it would not appeal to the fans, and walked away. Eventually he came back, but only after Marvel overhauled the entire creative direction and brought him into the conversation about where Frank is psychologically and physically. And apparently, that is exactly what it took.
The result, The Punisher: One Last Kill, hit number one on Disney+ in a single day and held that position worldwide across every category, films and TV combined. That does not surprise me at all.
Here is the thing about the comics audience, and I say this as someone who grew up reading them and as a Latino who has no issue with representation or diverse storytelling. I think giving underrepresented voices a platform is genuinely worthwhile and I support it. But there is a version of that effort that goes so far in trying to appeal to a new audience that it completely loses the people who were already there. That is what happened to Marvel under Disney for a stretch of years, and the numbers have reflected it.
After Endgame, I personally have not watched a single Marvel release that gave me the same level of investment. Endgame felt like a genuine conclusion. Everything after it just kind of landed flat. The excitement was not there. It stopped feeling like the universe I had followed for years and started feeling like something being built for an audience that was not me. And I am not alone in that.
Now look, I have no problem with Miss Marvel or shows built for a different segment of the fanbase. Do your thing. But when studios take that same energy and try to apply it to a character like the Punisher, stripping out everything that makes Frank Castle who he is in order to make it cleaner or more broadly palatable, they lose the people who actually care about that character. You cannot sanitize Frank Castle down to nothing and expect his audience to stick around.
I have read older comics. Some of that material from the 70s and 80s used language and depicted behaviors that do not hold up and do not need to be carried forward. Nobody is asking for that. But there is a wide gap between updating a character responsibly and gutting him entirely. Disney had been living in that gap for too long.
The Snow White situation said a lot. You can have a diverse cast and a reimagined story, but if the creative decisions pull so far away from what made the original resonate, the audience that cared about it is going to walk. And they did. The film earned around $205 million globally against a production budget that exceeded $300 million, resulting in losses estimated at over $115 million.
I am glad Bernthal pushed back and I am glad the studio actually listened this time. The Punisher special and what they have been doing with Daredevil suggest they are course correcting toward the audience that has always been there. That is a good sign. Whether they stay the course or drift back into the same patterns remains to be seen. But for right now, they gave us something worth watching, and that has not always been the case these past few years.
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