Marvel Writer Reveals Why Series Deserved To Be Cancelled
One Marvel series got canned almost immediately and here's why.
This article is more than 2 years old
Hulu’s supernatural series Helstrom has been officially, and unsurprisingly, canceled after one season. For those that are unfamiliar with the title, Helstrom was actually a Marvel IP and one of the last shows produced under the Marvel Television banner. Roy Thomas, the first successor of Stan Lee as editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, now reveals why the series deserved to be canceled and how its cancellation clears the path for a new dawn of Marvel Comics adaptations on the small screen.
According to Screen Rant, Roy Thomas said that Hulu’s short-lived Helstrom television series’ narrative shouldn’t have deviated from the original story from the comics. However, besides misspelling their name in Helstrom’s title, which originally reads Hellstrom in the comics, Hulu’s adaptation made several changes to already established comic book characters of devilish repute. Devilish is an appropriate descriptor, as they’re literally conceived as the children of Satan and a mortal woman Victoria Wingate, though Marvel decided to revise the storyline and swap Satan with a demon named Marduk Kurios.
Roy Thomas wasn’t really a fan of Helstrom either and has recently expressed his disdain about the now-canceled television show, stating that those who did the show should’ve read the comic because Helstrom wasn’t faithful to the source material. He compared his experience with Universal’s Hulk series from the ’70s, when the studio assumed that the good IP implies a good adaptation, no matter how loosely it’s based on the source material. Hulk fans were equally disappointed, as are those who have actually read Hellstrom comics.
Admittedly, the differences between the comics and Hulu’s adaptation were significant. As we previously said, the Hellstrom twins were children of Satan/Marduk Kurios and a mortal woman, but in the series, their parents were a serial killer/Satan cultist and a possessed demon worshiper. The twins, Daimon and Ana, kept their demonic powers described in the comics but retained very little of their respective storylines. Hulu’s Helstrom centers around the twins’ relationship with each other and their mother, but they rarely interact with one another in the comics, and their mother is a pretty irrelevant figure in the narrative. Not to mention that the show wasn’t connected to the Marvel Cinematic Universe “by design.”
Like many other Marvel IP adaptations outside of the MCU, including Runaways, The Gifted, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and others, Helstrom‘s suffered from its lack of adequate connection to the comics. Its cancelation now marks the end of Marvel Television’s decade-long tenure on the small screens. Luckily, Disney and the MCU have produced MCU-tied television series, like WandaVision, Loki, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which broadly expand the cinematic universe and serve as a precursor to major events of the film, allowing Marvel to adequately adapt its comic book releases to the silver screen. The other side of that particular coin lies in the fact that Marvel now releases everything on Disney+, including the Hellstrom reboot series, preventing Marvel from tackling its IP across different networks like ABC, FX, Hulu, and Netflix.
