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How Marvel Studios’ Disney+ series are correcting the mistakes from Netflix

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By Pete Hernandez III

We’ve yet to see one minute of Marvel Studios’ Disney+ series, but fans should be excited about how the studio has already corrected the mistakes of past Netflix shows.

Continuing its annual tradition of getting screentime during the NFL’s biggest game of the year, Marvel Studios leveraged the opportunity to release tv spots for their upcoming 2020 content. Fans expected a new spot showcasing May’s Black Widow, but you’d be smart to bet that fans were more excited for the reveal in the fourth quarter.

In just 30 seconds of footage, Marvel enthusiasts were treated to a cumulative preview of Disney+’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, WandaVision, and Loki. On-screen were small sequences of what is to come, but the fan excitement and aftermath was anything but “small.” The return of Baron Zemo, the homage to past sitcoms in WandaVision, and even a brief glimpse of our favorite God of Mischief was enough to have fans sold on what’s to come later in 2020.

Another key detail that should have fans excited is that Marvel Studios is already fixing the mistakes from past Netflix series. How so? They are avoiding the number “13.”

“13” as in the “13!” episodes in a standard Marvel Netflix series. What made the Netflix shows particularly appealing (at least early on) was their emphasis on a plot that remained ‘grounded.’ And leveraging that theme through a television series allows a grounded plot to be thoroughly explored over multiple hours, rather than being limited to a two and a half-hour slot.

But as the saying goes, “too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.”

When you have a live-action series built on a 40-plus minute episode average run-time, with no commercials, and then multiply that by 13? It’d be a safe bet to assume that there’s a likelihood of dragging out the story.

And for all the positive that came about from the Marvel Netflix shows, chances are that they dragged out the story with an episode or two that weren’t needed. With the size of the budget dedicated to these Disney+ series, you can count on Marvel Studios being strategic in the number of episodes dedicated to each show.

For the upcoming Marvel Disney+ series, there are six episodes dedicated to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, WandaVision, and Loki respectively. What is also key to remember is just because there’s a finite amount of episodes, we cannot rule out the likelihood of the themes and plots of the Disney+ series carrying over into the Marvel Cinematic films.

Again, we never saw a true crossover between Marvel’s Netflix properties and the MCU on the big screen or vice-versa. Now with more creative control of the streaming content, we can be sure that Kevin Feige and crew are maximizing the opportunities that were missed before. 

We’ll have to wait a little longer for Baby Yoda to make his return on Disney+, but in the meantime, August 2020 will be here sooner than later as The Falcon and the Winter Soldier makes its debut, with WandaVision and Loki following suit in December 2020 and Spring 2021 respectively.

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