Marvel fans, rejoice! Daredevil and the rest of the Defenders Saga TV shows, which were previously Netflix originals, have now officially arrived on Disney Plus. The popular mini-franchise, a splinter of the MCU, was pulled from Netflix at the end of February, with the Mouse House making them available in many territories worldwide this Wednesday, March 16. There’s only one hitch: the shows have yet to be added to the Marvel timeline.
Now that they’re available on Disney Plus, the series have been rebranded as “The Defenders Saga,” as that’s the name you’ll find them under when you visit the streaming site’s Marvel content homepage. The page breaks down the various MCU movies and TV series in handy chunks, delineating them between Phases One through Four as well as listing them together in one long official “Marvel Cinematic Universe Timeline in Order.” At the time of this writing, though, the Defenders Saga has yet to be filtered into the timeline.
If this was going to happen, it’s likely that Disney Plus would have updated the timeline upon the series’ release, so this seems to indicate that Marvel Studios still doesn’t consider the Defenders series to be part of the overall franchise’s narrative. That’s surprising in a number of ways. The shows are now streaming alongside the rest of the MCU’s content, for one, and — more pertinently — Daredevil’s Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio just cameod in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Hawkeye, respectively, providing irrefutable proof that it’s all connected.
There are even direct references to the films in the shows, with Daredevil season one tackling the fallout of The Avengers‘ Battle of New York and Jessica Jones season three featuring the Raft super-prison, as introduced in Captain America: Civil War. Despite all this, and their enormous popularity with fans, however, it seems that the Defenders’ status within the canon remains fuzzy.
Regardless, all 13 seasons of the Defenders Saga can be streamed on Disney Plus now.