Mike Colter

Mike Colter is shrugging off the cancellation of his Netflix series, the same way his character ‘Luke Cage’ shrugs off bullets.  News quietly emerged late on Friday that this part of the Marvel Netflix puzzle had gotten the ax due to “creative differences.”  Thus far, no one is offering any further insight than that, but Colter for one doesn’t seem ruffled.

The new dad took to Twitter to thank Marvel and Netflix and, of course, the fans who supported the show.  He pointed out that he had just had a daughter and was looking forward to new adventures:

Colter’s message echoes that of Cheo Hodari Coker, the series’ showrunner, who posted a similar message of gratitude on Twitter Monday.  Rumor has it, Netflix wanted to decrease the episode count for the third season to 10 rather than 13.  Even though the third season wasn’t ordered, it seems that Coker submitted some work, possibly even scripts to Netflix and the executives weren’t pleased with it, which led to this cancellation.

‘Luke Cage”s cancellation came a week after that of another Marvel Netflix series, ‘Iron Fist’.  But that show had had trouble from the start.  The first season was panned by both critics and viewers.  Even though it vastly improved during its second season, it’s easy to imagine that many viewers were not interested in giving it another try.

Many are speculating that these terminations have something to do with Disney Play, the new streaming service that will exclusively carry projects from that studio as well as subsidiaries Lucasfilm LTD and Marvel.  However, last week, Netflix’s Chief Content Officer, Ted Sarandos stressed that Disney didn’t have the power to cancel these shows and/or shift them over to its own service.

“Those shows are for us to cancel, and we’re super happy with their performance so far.”

Of course, he made that statement before axing ‘Luke Cage’.

‘Daredevil’ Season Three just arrived this past weekend, and there are upcoming seasons of ‘Jessica Jones’ and ‘The Punisher’ on the way.  Netflix definitely won’t announce cancellations for those two before the new seasons even arrive, but if we don’t hear anything about a fourth season of ‘Daredevil’ in the next few weeks, it’s safe to say that the mini-Marvel Universe on Netflix is over.