Marvel Studios and Netflix had a roller coaster panel at SDCC, beginning with footage from The Punisher and capping off the day in Hall H with a surprise screening of Marvel’s The Defenders, which will be released on Netflix August 18.
Here’s a look at everything we saw (SPOILERS ABOUND!):
- THE PUNISHER: Jeph Loeb began the evening by warning parents that some of the material they were screening might not be kid-friendly, and it was likely The Punisher’s graphic footage that he was referencing. Jon Bernthal was on hand to introduce the footage, which opened with Frank Castle teaching his daughter how to play guitar and then flashed forward to him now alone. In the subsequent scenes, we see Castle violently run over two men with his van in Alabama and shoot someone through the skull with a sniper rifle in Mexico (actually, Castle is over the border in the U.S. and makes the shot from a ridiculous distance). We end the scene with him strangling a man to death in a bathroom. The Punisher is set to debut on Netflix this fall.
- IRON FIST: Loeb announced on stage that Iron Fist would be getting a second season, which he said was news to everyone on the stage, including Finn Jones.
- THE DEFENDERS: After doing some Q&A with the cast, Loeb indicated they’d be showing some footage from The Defenders. He joked that it was a clip that happened to be the same length as Episode 1 of the series. The episode was a decent jumping on point but mostly acted as table setting. None of The Defenders actually even meet in the episode – instead the pilot feels more like several small scenes from each of the shows stitched together, and as such the strength of each component largely depends on how you feel about the characters (the Iron Fist scenes were the least successful, for me, while Daredevil’s were the most compelling). We see Danny Rand and Colleen Wing hunting down members of The Hand, Jessica Jones drinking and refusing new cases, Luke Cage getting out of prison and coming home, and Matt Murdock hanging up his Daredevil suit to fight in court. We also get a good amount of Sigourney Weaver’s Alexandra, who gets some disturbing news about her health and appears to be fighting fate with help of The Hand. Lastly, Élodie Yung appears as a definitely-not-dead Elektra, whom Yung tells us is now suffering from some kind of amnesia (it’s not really clear in the episode, but this was stated by Yung prior to the screening). The episode ends with a city-wide event that will presumably act as the catalyst to bring the team together.
