Hulu is officially getting into the superhero game (The Awesomes doesn’t count), with Deadline reporting that it has just grabbed a little corner of the Marvel universe for itself by giving a series order to a show based on Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona’s fan-favorite Runaways series. Titled Marvel’s Runaways—because branding is important—the show is being developed by Gossip Girl creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, and they’ll also write the series and serve as showrunners. As far as we know, no casting decisions have been made yet.
The original Runaways comic is about a group of teenagers who discover that their parents are part of a supervillain group called The Pride, and it’s basically recognized as the coming-of-age comic of the superhero world. Runaways also didn’t tie into the rest of the Marvel universe very much in the comics, which means it should be easy for Hulu to split the show off from the Avengers and X-Men movies—assuming it’s not overtly tied into either of them. Plus, that means the Runaways show won’t require viewers to constantly ignore the fact that, say, Stark Tower isn’t in the New York skyline the way a different streaming service’s superhero shows do.
Deadline’s report doesn’t offer much more than that, but it does quote Marvel’s Jeph Loeb as saying that Schwartz and Savage’s Gossip Girl spoke “genuinely to this exact audience,” so that should give people some idea of what to expect from this.