Marvel Executive Reveals Future For Disney+ Shows
Over the past two years, we’ve seen Disney embark on a major cost-cutting exercise across the entire company, cutting thousands of jobs, cancelling projects, and generally reducing the amount of content it creates as it looks to streamline itself and make its streaming division more profitable.
Marvel Studios has also had to go through a major shakeup following the failure of many Marvel films and shows in 2023, including “The Marvels”, “Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantmania” and “Secret Invasion”. The films bombed at the box office, and we’ve seen interest in the Marvel Disney+ series slowly decline.
Many have pointed to superhero fatigue as one of the issues, while others point to a reduction in quality, which both issues stem from an increase in the amount of content being made for Disney+, especially from the Bob Chapek era, which just wanted “more”.
Since Bob Iger’s return as CEO, we’ve seen Marvel hit the pause button, with many films and shows delayed, as they look to cut costs, improve quality and try to make Marvel releases feel special again.
Recently, while promoting the upcoming series, “Agatha All Along”, Brad Winderbaum, the head of Marvel TV, spoke with EW and shared an update on the future of Marvel Studios on Disney+. Originally, the idea behind Marvel’s move into Disney+ was that they wanted to create shows that were tied directly into the movies.
“Now, we are thinking about television really more like traditional television where they could last for multiple seasons, where we can see the characters brew in the culture for hopefully many years.
Brad also went on to explain their strategy moving forward to making shows on Disney+:
One thing we are doing is we’re developing a lot of shows now simultaneously. So, in a way, we’re making television more in a traditional style where we are going to write multiple pilots and show bibles before we decide what we want to produce and actually bring to the screen, which gives us an opportunity to experiment and also to plan all sorts of different Marvel sandboxes.”
One of the many complaints about the Disney+ shows is that so far, only one show, “Loki”, has had a second season, resulting in all these new characters being introduced, without many of them reappearing since. So, having multiple seasons of shows would help establish those characters much more than a simple one and done.
Marvel Studios has also suffered from the issue of trying to turn movies into TV shows rather than making a TV show. The creative process for many of the initial Marvel shows wasn’t like other TV series, but now they’ve shifted their view, embracing how TV is made, launching a Marvel Television and Marvel Animation banner rather than just having everything labelled as Marvel Studios, which now is just for movies.
Roger’s Take: After the success of the “Infinity War” saga, it almost feels like Marvel Studios got too cocky and thought they could churn anything out, and it would be a huge success. It was almost an arrogance that they didn’t need to make shows in the same way that other studios have done for decades, instead doing their own thing.
But now, they’ve realised, the methods used by TV studios to create shows have been tweaked and perfected over decades, so why not use that methodology? Having higher quality shows that are visually on par with the movies and the stories intertwined with the movies all sounds great, but it is also very expensive. As we are seeing with its other brands, such as Star Wars, Pixar, and National Geographic, they are all releasing far fewer titles, instead focusing on getting those projects better, which hopefully will result in better results. However, expect to see far fewer Marvel Disney+ shows moving forward.
What do you think of the future of Marvel shows on Disney+? Let me know on social media!
Roger Palmer
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