Well, feel free to cite some sources. I'd love to check'em out. But you don't strike me as a particularly keen TV insider so...well, you know.
Dude, seriously? Have you even started with Wikipedia? Or Google? This isn't exactly something that requires "keen industry insider" perspective; it's pretty common knowledge.
As far as commercial success goes, given the millions of dollars of revenue it has brought in from DVD sales alone, not to mention all the paraphernalia surrounding the series and it's spin-off, Angel, I'd say it was a pretty darn big success.
The same can be said of Firefly which made a huge amount of money in merchandise and DVD sales.
You just made all that up. I have no idea what the sales were like, and most importantly, I have no idea what the
costs where like, so whether or not that managed to pique some business-man's interest at the studio is all complete conjecture.
But I'm going with not. Especially relative to the alternatives. Y'know; actual hit shows.
With all of the different Marvel alien races to pick from, I'm surprised they went with one that was made up or doesn't have much history. Or maybe that was the idea, since they were just there to get beat up on.
I think the idea was, "let's pick an alien race that isn't cheesy."
I guess maybe Shi'ar could have qualified as not-cheesy, but then again, they've always been too associated with the X-men to turn up in an Avengers movie.
Which is one of my pet peeves; the X-stuff and the Avengers/FF have always been pretty chimney-like, with hard walls between them. I mean, yeah--Beast, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver and lately even Wolverine have all been Avengers in the past, but curiously that doesn't really lead to closer ties between the two continuities within a continuity. Same for the crossover events. How come the Avengers never fight Magneto? Why don't the X-men take exception to Doctor Doom. Don't the X-men think that the threat posed by someone like Galactus is important enough? Don't the Avengers think the same about Apocalypse? And so on, and so on.
FF and Avengers have become fairly tightly integrated to the point where it's often easy to forget that some of the most classic villains in the entire Marvel universe are FF villains originally. The X-men continue to stand apart. And to a great degree, so has Spiderman until very recent years (and I don't just mean putting him on the Avengers team; the whole Dark Avengers routine was another big step in the integration of Spiderman and his associated characters into the greater Marvel orbit.)
Anyway, you could make a case that both the look and the name (and the MO) of the skrulls are all kinda cheesy, so I can see why the producers would want to shy away from them.
