Secret Invasion director brushes off mixed reviews

The Disney+ Marvel television show strategy is an exercise in diminishing returns. Even big boss Bob Iger thinks the influx of series has “diluted focus and attention” from the brands. Nevertheless, the show(s) must go on, and the people who make them must live with the consequences. So it is for Secret Invasion director and executive producer Ali Selim, one of the only people who can actually talk about it amid a dual writer-actor strike.

Selim has a pretty normal reaction to getting bad press in general: “Oh, I don’t read reviews. With all due respect,” he tells Variety. “For me, I view all the storytelling work I do as a dialogue with an audience. When the show is finished and put up on the screen, that’s my half of the dialogue. And the audience then starts their half of the response to it. I think that’s valuable, but I don’t know.”

But for the Marvel Cinematic Universe in particular? “[Projects] resonate with different people at different times for different reasons, and Marvel has a very devoted—even rabid—fan base who have expectations and when their expectations aren’t fulfilled, they move in the other direction; they give it a thumbs down,” Selim opines. “I don’t know—is it our job to fulfill their expectations? Or to tell the story that we’re telling? So, it’s a tricky thing.”

The balance between serving the fans and serving the story can no doubt be tricky, but it’s certainly doable. Take WandaVision, for example: no one could argue that fans’ expectations were fulfilled on that project because surely no fans expected the exact sort of genre-bending sci-fi exploration of grief that WandaVision was. Yet that show managed to delight avid MCU fans and television critics alike.

As Selim notes in his interview, not every project can be a winner, but Secret Invasion marks a new low for the MCU. According to Rotten Tomatoes, it’s the lowest-rated entry in the Marvel canon ever (via NME). It’s probably time for a course correction (especially if Bob Iger is calling the studio out), but that’s a job for someone who is not Ali Selim. He’s content enough with what he accomplished with Secret Invasion. “[There’s] a big fight in Episode 6, but there’s also this incredibly vulnerable conversation between a broken Gravik and a really broken Fury, who we ultimately learn is G’iah. But when you’re watching it, you are watching two men say ‘I’m sorry,’ which is kind of groundbreaking in a way,” he contends in another interview with Deadline. “I mean, would you ever see Biden and Putin in a room saying, ‘I’m sorry?’ I don’t think so.”

Perhaps not everyone picked up on just how groundbreaking this series was? In any case, “I would love it if everybody loved it, but I also don’t have that expectation myself,” Selim says to Variety, “so I feel great about the response to it.”