The View hopes Rosie O’Donnell will return like an avenging superhero to the morning chat fest, righting past wrongs and revamping the tired format after ABC gutted the show earlier this year. But until Rosie reports for work, The View is substituting other superheroes–real ones, if you will. Nothing quite galvanizes a giant passionate audience like superheroes, who make cash registers tingle like Spidey-sense. So Disney–which owns ABC, The View, and Marvel Entertainment–is using the synergy between its brands to add some cross-promotional punch.
Marvel promo’d that it will be “announcing its latest explosive title live on the Emmy-winning daily talk show ‘The View’.” (That’s Tuesday morning at 11AM EST.) Will Marvel mania ensue? Can The View expect a Comic-Con type bump from the rumor? Thor 3, due in 2017, is one possible subject of all the manufactured speculation. Whoopi Goldberg, the only returning View host, was allegedly trying to get LeBron James–another kind of superhero–to announce his “decision” on The View, but he chose Sports Illustrated. (The James announcement broke all pageview records at SI.) It remains to be seen whether Comic-Con types will start regularly tuning in to watch Rosie and company.