The Strategy
When Disney launched its streaming service in 2019, Marvel became one of its main attractions. The plan was simple: extend the MCU onto Disney+ with big-budget series that would tie directly into the films. Fans would subscribe to keep up, and the story would flow back and forth between cinema and sofa.
Starting in 2021, the series came fast. WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, What If…?, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, Secret Invasion, a second season of Loki and Agatha All Along, plus more. At the same time, the film schedule stayed as busy as ever.
I think the Disney+ push did more damage to Marvel than any single bad film could have. A weak movie costs you a Friday night. A weak series costs you six or eight hours you feel obliged to finish before the next movie makes sense, and I resent a studio handing me homework and calling it a bonus.
On paper, it looked like expansion. In practice, it was dilution, and the audience felt it long before the studio admitted it.
Too Much to Watch
The first problem was attention, and it’s the simplest. Before Disney+, keeping up with Marvel meant seeing two or three films a year. Afterward, it meant several films plus dozens of hours of television. For casual fans, the ones who made the MCU a phenomenon, that was simply too much.
Something had to give, and for many people, it was the franchise itself. They stopped keeping up, fell behind and eventually stopped caring. The superfans stayed. The general audience, the people who turned Avengers films into billion-dollar events, drifted away.
Marvel seemed to assume that everybody who loved the films would happily follow the series too.
Some did. Many didn’t have the time, the subscription or the interest, and the franchise lost the casual goodwill that had sustained it for a decade. A franchise can survive losing its critics. It can’t survive losing its casual fans.
Films as Homework
The second problem hurt more: the films started depending on the series. To follow Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, you needed to have watched WandaVision, because Wanda’s turn to villainy only made sense if you’d seen her grief play out on television. To follow The Marvels, you needed Ms. Marvel and, ideally, WandaVision too. To understand the multiverse, you needed Loki.
That broke one of the MCU’s great strengths: each film used to work on its own, with the connections as a bonus.
Now the films came with a reading list, and audiences who hadn’t done the homework sat there confused. Some viewers enjoyed the puzzle. Most just wanted to see a movie on a Friday night without having to study first. It’s not surprising that many of them stopped buying tickets.
The early Avengers films asked me to show up and have a good time, and Multiverse of Madness wanted to know whether I’d done my WandaVision homework first. That’s the worst of the drain, because a movie ticket shouldn’t come with prerequisites.
For Writers
The films began depending on the series, so audiences who hadn’t watched the shows felt lost. The franchise broke its own rule that each film should stand alone.
Every book in a series should work on its own terms, even if it’s richer for readers who know the earlier ones. The moment a new reader needs a guide just to follow the plot, you’ve lost them.
Test each book by imagining a reader who’s never seen the others. Can they follow it? Do they care? If not, some of what you’re assuming they know needs to be on the page. A line of context costs you little. A lost reader costs you the whole series.
Spread Too Thin
The third problem was capacity. There’s only so much a studio can do well. Marvel Studios had built its reputation on a tightly managed, carefully supervised slate of films. Suddenly it was producing several times as much content, and the same small group of executives, effects vendors and creative leaders had to oversee all of it.
The strain showed. Visual effects artists complained publicly about crushing workloads and last-minute changes. Several series had troubled productions, reshoots and rewrites. Effects quality dropped noticeably, most famously in She-Hulk, whose computer-generated heroine drew mockery before the show even aired. The machine that once made Marvel reliable was being asked to do far more than it could, and the cracks showed on screen.
Uneven Quality
The fourth problem was the quality itself, and it’s the one that did lasting damage. A few of the series were good. WandaVision was inventive and moving. Loki was clever and stylish, and its second season ended beautifully. Moon Knight had Oscar Isaac doing wild, committed work. Those good series make the rest harder to forgive. WandaVision and Loki prove Marvel knew how to do this well, and the studio chose volume anyway.
But many were mediocre or worse. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was muddled. Secret Invasion, with a huge budget and Samuel L. Jackson, was widely considered a dud. She-Hulk divided audiences with its fourth-wall jokes and its episode mocking online critics. Every weak series chipped away at the brand, because audiences stopped assuming that anything with the Marvel logo was worth their time.
For Writers
A few Disney+ series were excellent, but many were mediocre, and every weak one lowered audience expectations for everything that followed it.
A body of work is judged by its weakest parts as well as its best, often more harshly. Every book you publish either strengthens or weakens what readers expect from your name, and a disappointing book costs you more than a good one earns. Publish less and make it better. Readers forgive a long wait for a great book far more readily than they forgive a quick, weak one, and they remember the weak one when your next book comes out. A reputation is built slowly and spent fast.
The Brand Lost Its Promise
That’s the deepest damage, and it’s the hardest to repair.
For a decade, the Marvel logo was a promise: whatever this is, it’ll be good, or at least good fun. The films built that trust. The series spent it. When a viewer sat through a disappointing show, the next film didn’t get the benefit of the doubt.
I’ve written about my own version of that in Why I’m Watching the MCU in Fast Forward. Once the promise was gone, the franchise became something to sample, skim or skip, and that’s a disastrous position for a franchise that depends on everybody showing up.
Nobody Remembers the Series
There’s another cost. Television series, especially streaming ones, don’t create the shared cultural moments that films do.
When Endgame came out, the whole world saw it in the same week and talked about it together. When a Marvel series dropped on Disney+, a fraction of the audience watched it, at different times, and the conversation fizzled.
That meant major story developments, new characters and big emotional moments were happening where most of the audience never saw them. Characters introduced on streaming arrived in films as strangers to most viewers, who had to be caught up or left behind.
The Pull-Back
By 2023, Disney had noticed. Under Bob Iger, who returned as chief executive in late 2022, the company announced that Marvel would slow down, making fewer films and fewer series and taking more care over each. Several projects were delayed or scaled back, and the studio began talking about quality over quantity.
It was the right call, and it came late.
The damage to the brand had been done, and the audience that drifted away wasn’t going to come back just because there were fewer shows. Films like The Fantastic Four: First Steps suggest the slower approach can produce better work. Winning back trust will take longer.
The pull-back also admitted something the studio had resisted saying out loud: that the problem lay with the work itself, more than with the audience, the critics or superhero fatigue in the abstract. There was too much of it, and too much of it wasn’t good enough. Every studio executive knew it privately. Saying it publicly took years, several expensive failures and a change at the top of the company.
Film Budgets for Television
The series weren’t cheap. Several reportedly cost as much as a major feature film, with Secret Invasion alone widely reported at over two hundred million dollars. That money bought film-level effects and film-level stars, and it also meant film-level pressure on schedules, vendors and executives who were already stretched.
Worse, the spending didn’t buy the thing that matters most: a strong story. Money can make a series look expensive. It can’t make one good. The most successful series, WandaVision and Loki, succeeded on ideas and performances instead of budgets.
Characters Nobody Followed
The series also introduced a crowd of new characters meant to carry the franchise forward: Kate Bishop in Hawkeye, Kamala Khan in Ms. Marvel, Marc Spector in Moon Knight, Jennifer Walters in She-Hulk, Sam Wilson as the new Captain America. Some were charming. Almost none became household names.
That’s because most of the audience never met them.
A character introduced to a slice of Disney+ subscribers arrives in a film as a stranger to everybody else. Kamala Khan was delightful in Ms. Marvel, and when she turned up in The Marvels, much of the cinema audience had no idea who she was. The franchise was trying to build its future in a room most of its audience never entered.
Kamala Khan is the loss I mind most. She was a delight, and Marvel parked her where most of its audience would never meet her, then sent her into The Marvels as a stranger to most of the people buying tickets.
Secret Invasion
Secret Invasion is the clearest example of the whole problem. It had Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, Olivia Colman and Emilia Clarke, a huge budget and a premise drawn from a famous comic storyline about shape-shifting aliens infiltrating Earth. It should have been a paranoid spy thriller.
Instead, it was slow, muddled and oddly weightless, with an opening credits sequence made with artificial intelligence that drew criticism of its own. Major characters died with little impact, and the series left almost no trace on the films that followed. It was a lot of money and talent spent on something that barely mattered. I’d call Secret Invasion the most expensive shrug in the whole franchise. That cast, that budget, a famous comic storyline to draw on, and I can’t point to one thing it changed.
What Should Have Happened
The Disney+ idea wasn’t doomed. A handful of carefully chosen series, each with a strong creative voice, standing on its own and enriching the films without being required for them, could have worked beautifully. WandaVision and Loki show what that might have looked like.
The mistake was volume. Marvel treated streaming as a content pipeline to fill, and quality was the price. More was just more, and the audience could tell.
Craft Note
Craft Note
The Disney+ Series Drain is a story about volume beating quality. Marvel produced more than its creative capacity could support, and every weak entry spent some of the trust its best work had earned.
Trust is the real currency of any body of work. Readers who trust your name will try your next book without question. Readers who’ve been disappointed need convincing. Protect the trust your best work earns. Release nothing you wouldn’t be proud to have a new reader find first.
More Was Never Better
Marvel’s Disney+ series were supposed to deepen the MCU, and they buried it. They overwhelmed the audience, turned films into homework, stretched the studio past its limits and taught people that Marvel was something they could skip. I’d keep WandaVision and Loki and happily lose most of the rest, and I think the pull-back came years after the damage was plain to anybody outside the building.
