After building up a huge following on the small screen, Marvel are preparing to unleash their television version of The Avengers with the superhero team-up The Defenders, which see’s Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist come together to fight a seeimingly insurmountable evil in New York City and sees them lock horns with the legendary Sigourney Weaver who takes on villain duties in the mini-series.

We were lucky enough to speak to the head showrunner of the show Marco Ramirez, who was also the lead runner of Daredevil and chat all things Netflix and Marvel.

“It (The Defenders) was always something that was part of the plan and when Netflix and Marvel signed the deal it was these our shows and then The Defenders, which was like this ‘superbowl’.” said Ramirez when we spoke about the hugely anticipated show, saying that there was no way that the heroes wouldn’t come together at some point.

“So it was always there, it was always kind of Christmas – ‘It’ll come!’ – but it’s later and not now so we all knew it was coming and what was happening as I imagine was everyone else in those writer’s rooms. Often we would find ourselves pitching ideas but Jeph Loeb would say ‘That’s for The Defenders!’ and we were all very measured about it.”

With such a show of heroes teaming up to fight together the challenges behind the scenes to keep the show true to what has gone before while making sure that each of the characters had a fair say in proceedings was a challenge from the off and Ramirez said that combining all of the elements that had already been created was tricky but that the writer’s embraced it, saying:

“The biggest was probably combining our four of these different worlds into one world and even though JJ and Luke had been in their shows together just combining these characters tonally felt like it was always going to be a challenge and for a while I remember in the writer’s room I really struggled with kind of how to wrap my head around the fact that Jessica Jones and Danny Rand were going to be in the same room until it just felt like instead shying away from it and being scared of it just lean into it and when that happened, it all got a lot easier for us.”

Aside from the return of Charlie Cox, Krysten Ritter, Mike Colter and Finn Jones, we also see appearances from Rosario Dawson, Scott Glenn, Elodie Yung, Deborah Ann Woll, Rachael Taylor, Simone Missick and Carrie-Anne Moss. But it’s the newest recruit to the show, Aliens and Ghostbusters star Sigourney Weaver, that has fans salivating and Ramirez says that they had written the character in the Weaver mould never thinking she would be involved – until she said yes:

“I’m still not convinced by it like it dodn’t happen! We started building a character as a Sigourney Weaver-type and we thought it would be somebody like a Sigourney Weaver – really powerful, really strong woman who’s physically interesting and she’s really intellectually intersting like Signourney, not that we thought we would get her but weirdly enough it happened – we got Ripley! And she’s wonderful on the show and to work with.”

Fans would alos love to see the TV Marvel heroes join their MCU counterparts on the big screen at some point, especially as some of the “old guard” (Iron Man, Captain America, Thor et al) may soon be departing the universe, depending on how Avengers: Infinity War and it’s sequel, pay out. But Ramirez is coy about it al and simply tells us:

“That’s well above my pay grade!”

Then again in Marvel world, anything is possible…

The Defenders starts on Netflix on August 11th.