Marvel's 'Iron Fist' Writer Tapped for 'Runaways' — What Does This Tell Us About the Future of Marvel TV?

Just a month ago, we learned that #Marvel and Hulu are working together to bring Marvel's Runaways to life! The catch is, Marvel TV has a lot of projects in the works, and often they seem to go very quiet. We've not heard anything about Cloak and Dagger since April, for example, and Damage Control doesn't seem to have gotten off the ground. So Marvel fans know to keep their ears to the ground for news before they get too excited about a series.

We finally got the news we were eagerly awaiting, when Tamara Becher — writer of Marvel's #IronFist — tweeted that she was beginning her next job, and included an image of the Runaways. ScreenRant spotted the tweet, and soon the news was starting to make its way across the Internet. In a fascinating twist, though, a check on Tamara Becher's Twitter will tell you that her informative tweet has now been deleted.

What does this tell us?

We can safely assume that Tamara Becher didn't make this up, so we know that Marvel is making progress on Runaways. We also know it's only at the scripting stage, pretty much confirming that the show isn't going to release until 2017 at the very earliest. What we don't know, though, is whether or not Tamara Becher is working on the whole series or just the pilot.

The fact Becher deleted the tweet is also informative, suggesting that Marvel had intended to keep this under wraps. It makes me wonder about the status of other seemingly dormant Marvel properties; there may well be other writers at work on, say, Cloak and Dagger or New Warriors who knew better than to publicly Tweet about their involvement. So, this curious teaser gives us a new excitement for all Marvel's TV projects.

What can we expect from the pilot?

The original Runaways comic was created by the legendary Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona back in 2003. The concept was simple: a bunch of kids discover that their parents are actually a gang of supervillains! It was a tremendously fun generational conflict, inverting the 'fear of youth' that's so familiar in modern culture.

The Runaways pilot will most likely give us the iconic origin of the team (fans would never forgive the series for using a different plot there). That origin necessarily sets up the pattern for the whole series, with the kids coming into conflict with their supervillain parents. That doesn't necessarily mean that further episodes will follow the classic comic book arc, of course, as it involves everything from a surprise betrayal (would that really be such a surprise if it's simply repeated on the screen?) to a deal with demons!

Whatever the future may hold for Runaways, I think the most exciting takeaway from this is that Marvel's making progress on their TV slate. For a while now, the future of Marvel has been seeming to be on Netflix; I'm excited at the idea of greater tonal diversity across new, untested channels. Bring on the Runaways!