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Disney has strict rules on showing graphic content in its movies. We see a lot less blood even if a character falls from a great height. But Marvel shows, especially on Netflix, have a lot of graphic content. For example, in Daredevil, Kingpin took a person's head using a car door.
Another example is smoking is not allowed in MCU movies, while we can see that a lot in MCU Netflix shows.
Why is this the case?
Starting with Daredevil, because it's the first of the Netflix Marvel shows to come out...
Development
In April 2013, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige confirmed that the film rights to Daredevil and his associated characters reverted to Marvel from 20th Century Fox in October 2012, allowing those characters to be used within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As explained by head of Marvel Television Jeph Loeb in 2015, Marvel Studios had "first dibs" on the character once the rights had reverted. Drew Goddard pitched a new Daredevil film to Marvel, but Marvel was not looking to create an R-rated film, and Goddard did not want a "watered down version" of the character, as he also explained in 2015: "I went into Marvel and talked to them about making it as a movie a couple of years ago, long after the Affleck movie. But what we all sort of realized is that, this movie doesn't want to cost $200 million. The thing about Matt Murdock is, he's not saving the world. He's just keeping his corner clean. So it would feel wrong to have spaceships crashing in the middle of the city. But because of that, Marvel on the movie side is not in the business of making $25 million movies. They're going big, as they should."[46] Marvel Studios eventually decided that the character would be better served in a television series.
So essentially this push from Drew Goddard to keep Daredevil "truer" to the comic adaptation, allowed for Marvel Studios, a subsidiary of Disney since 2009, to save this project for a television series, instead of making it a film in part due to the kind of budget Goddard wanted.
In October 2013, Deadline Hollywood reported that Marvel was preparing four drama series and a miniseries, totaling 60 episodes, to present to video on demand services and cable providers, with Netflix, Amazon and WGN America expressing interest. A few weeks later, Marvel and Disney announced that Marvel Television and ABC Studios would provide Netflix with live action series centered around Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, and Luke Cage, leading up to a miniseries based on the Defenders. This format was chosen due to the success of Marvel's The Avengers, for which the characters of Iron Man, The Hulk, Captain America, and Thor were all introduced separately before being teamed up in that film. In December, Goddard was officially hired as executive producer and showrunner for Daredevil, but Marvel announced in May 2014 that he had stepped down from the role to focus on directing a feature film based on Marvel's Sinister Six for Sony Pictures Entertainment. Goddard, who wrote the first two episodes of the series, remained with the show as a consultant and executive producer, while Steven S. DeKnight took over as showrunner. Marvel revealed that the series would officially be titled Marvel's Daredevil,[50] with DeKnight, Goddard, Loeb, Jim Chory, Dan Buckley, Joe Quesada, Stan Lee, Alan Fine, Cindy Holland, Kris Henigman, Allie Goss, and Peter Friedlander serving as executive producers.
So at some point we have to presume the EPs got together and said let's not just do one of these darker neo crime noir takes on just one character, let's still follow the format of The Avengers and create multiple series and crossovers leading to The Defenders.
To try and say why "exactly" they went in this direction seems to be unknown, but creatively I think they just saw potential to branch out the franchise by offering a different tone/aesthetic/taste and medium (streaming service), which seems to be mostly successful.
Fox began to do something similar with X-Men by adding some nostalgia and appealing to a younger audience with the revitalization of First Class and Days of the Future Past, but also with spin-offs like Legion, Logan, Deadpool, and New Mutants. It's just a way to bring other kinds of viewers into the franchise, while also being more creative and redefining the super hero genre.
