What is it that makes Marvel’s Disney Plus offerings underwhelming for a lot of fans? Very few of the MCU’s streaming series have been what you would call universally beloved, and a common criticism directed at them is that they might start strong but by the time the credits roll on the finale we’re left feeling oddly underfed. Well, wonder no more as some cold, hard math applied to Secret Invasion reveals the real reason Disney Plus keeps disappointing us.
Like the majority of the Marvel D+ shows before it, Secret Invasion was marketed as a six-hour television event, thanks to its six-part storyline playing out over a month and a half. The only problem is, though, that the episodes have been practically getting shorter each and every week. While the first two were circling a respectable 55 minutes in length, the past two episodes have been hardly more than 30 minutes.
One Redditor on the r/MarvelStudios sub has gone ahead and crunched the numbers ahead of next Wednesday’s conclusion and they’ve discovered that the series’ total runtime at this juncture is just 3 hours, 39 minutes. Which, needless to say, is falling far short of that promised 6 hours with just one more episode to go.
While Secret Invasion‘s fluctuating episode lengths is a fairly extreme example, it’s common for Marvel TV episodes to clock in somewhere between 35-50 minutes in runtime, so many of those six-parter shows — such as Moon Knight, Loki, and Ms. Marvel — likely also clock out way before they’ve reached the six-hour mark.
Of course, Marvel’s movies rarely come in longer than 2 hours, 30 minutes and they usually leave us fully satisfied, but in TV terms what will likely be about four and a half hours stretched over six weeks is hardly a feast. If the MCU really wants to start making sure it’s feeding its fans right, the studio may want to start offering bigger portions. Although first, it might need to reduce the budgets somewhat.
Published: Jul 19, 2023 07:53 am