The Marvel Cinematic Universe has never been too beholden to its source material, with the company’s vast comic book library being used as more of a rough guideline than a text that demands to be adhered to. That being said, based on the lukewarm reviews so far, maybe Secret Invasion director Ali Selim should have at least given it a perusal.
Surprising everyone by going down as not just the MCU’s worst-reviewed Disney Plus series yet but also one of the lowest-rated episodic projects of the entire Marvel Studios era, Secret Invasion has a mountain to climb in order to win the skeptics back onside. While it was never going to be a beat-for-beat adaptation, Selim’s revelations in an interview with Inverse indicates that perhaps he should have ignored the advice.
“I was told on the first day, don’t even bother reading them. It has nothing to do with this series. The series really was born out of the energy that Marvel witnessed when they saw Sam Jackson and Ben Mendelsohn on screen in Captain Marvel. And they said, ‘We have to continue this. It’s just too electric.’”
While there are still four episodes remaining unseen that have the potential to turn the tide of critical apathy, the odds are nonetheless stacked against Secret Invasion from the beginning. It’s a situation nobody expect the show to find itself in given the concept, cast, and promise of an altogether different kind of MCU offering, but then again, it’s on-brand for the Multiverse Saga to deliver something more tepid than red hot.