Marvel’s Inhumans was, to put it mildly, a disappointment.
Let’s start from the top: Nobody liked it, not critics and not audiences. Then, to add insult to injury, Marvel premiered the pilot in Imax theaters, as though it were a prestige project with incredible visuals. But it wasn’t, and people could tell, and so hardly anybody went and saw it. Then, by all accounts, the quality of the show did not improve over later episodes, despite Marvel telling critics the pilot had been “unfinished.”
And now, even Imax itself “concedes” that the “Inhumans experiment” was a letdown, according to Deadline. Imax CEO Rich Gelfond blamed the failure on “a misalignment of customer expectations,” which, like, sure, that’s what it was … if customers expected Inhumans to be good.
Not only that, but Gelfond was so disappointed by the performance of Inhumans that he says Imax will be much more conservative in the future regarding events like these. So don’t expect another Imax television event, broadcasting episodes of a show that never deserved to be in Imax. That being said, as Deadline notes, Imax has been doing just fine financially of late, with big gains in the stock market.
That makes those at Marvel and ABC the only people involved in the project, and perhaps the only people in the world, who won’t just come out and admit that the show was bad. Maybe the best part of Deadline’s report is that they say they asked Marvel TV heads Jeph Loeb and Jim Chory about Inhumans, and apparently the two execs just walked away.
Read our review of Inhumans, in which Paste’s Amy Glynn deems the show “a total lemon,” right here.