Cloak & Dagger

Comic book adaptations these days are, at least as a general rule, far more faithful to the source material than they were even a decade ago. That’s not to say that filmmakers don’t tweak characters or story points in the process, but for the most part, those changes tend to be more organic and more grounded in the logic of the story that is being told. That even tends to be the case with the bigger changes, such as one that was made in the course of developing Marvel’s television adaptation of ‘Cloak & Dagger’.

Speaking to /Film ahead of this week’s premiere broadcast, showrunner Joe Pokaski discussed perhaps the biggest change he made to the characters’ history and explained why he chose to implement it:

“It’s funny, when you look at the old comics, they had those pages that were filled with way too many words and referenced their backstories where Tandy kind of ran away from a semi-abusive relationship and Tyrone was living in Boston. They had these lives that we kind of skirt over in the comics and I thought showing their parents, showing where they came from in the long format felt the right thing to do to really understand them as human beings and also just to mess with their heads, because that’s what parents are there for.”

Notably, this is similar to the approach ‘Runaways’ took last fall. Whereas the comics upon which the show is based saw the kids, well, run away in the immediate aftermath of the events depicted in the series premiere, the show chose to highlight their home lives, developing their relationships with their parents before running away at the end of the season. Though Pokaski is quick to note that he doesn’t want to spoil anything, he suggests that ‘Cloak & Dagger’ may do something similar, adding that “that’s certainly an option that we always have in front of us and we always want to consider when the right time to do it is.”

Marvel’s latest television outing, ‘Cloak & Dagger’, stars Olivia Holt, Aubrey Joseph, Andrea Roth, Gloria Reuben, Miles Mussenden, Carl Lundstedt, Emma Lahana, Jaime, Zevallos, and J.D. Evermore. The series will kick off with a two-episode premiere on Freeform on June 7, 2018.