Marvel's Cloak and Dagger are coming to the small screen, but this one won't be on Netflix.
Cloak and Dagger has long seemed like a natural fit for TV. With the rise of Marvel Netflix series like Daredeviland Jessica Jones, the story about a pair of teenage runaways who find themselves granted superpowers after they're injected with some bizarre drugs against their will, would have seemed like a perfect fit for the Hell's Kitchen corner of the Marvel Universe.
Announced earlier this year, a Cloak and Dagger TV series is coming to Freeform (formerly known as ABC Family). Expect the romance between Ty "Cloak" Johnson and Tandy "Dagger" Bowen to take a prominent role in this. In fact, since this is coming to the youth-centric Freeform network, it makes sense that this would have something of a YA approach.
"It’s a love story that happens to have characters that have always traditionally been in that age group,” Marvel TV head Jeph Loeb said at the TCAs in August (via SlashFilm). “It’s not like we took something and made it into a YA. It speaks to a YA audience and is a YA property. Would I do Punisher on Freeform? I don’t think that’s going to connect the same way.”
Freeform is taking Cloak and Dagger straight to series, which makes sense considering that the Marvel name is a safe bet to raise the profile of the recently rebranded ABC Family. A sentence buried in an article about Freeform on The Hollywood Reporterindicates that they're considering the series for a Winter 2018 premiere.
On the other hand, the fact that there's no announced talent on this one, not even a writer or executive producer, is a little puzzling. At one point, Cloak and Dagger seemed like it might be a good fit for the mystery Marvel TV project that John Ridley (12 Years a Slave) has been developing since last year. We can now eliminate that, though.
Cloak and Dagger were created by Bill Mantlo and Ed Hannigan, and first appeared in 1982's Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #64. They were quickly spun off into a critically acclaimed limited series of their own, by Mantlo and artists Rick Leonardi and Terry Austin. They more recently appeared in Marvel's Runaways, another series that is just screaming to be taken to TV.
We'll update this article with more information as it becomes available.
