The MCU’s run on Disney Plus isn’t going great.
A few of the franchise’s streaming series have pulled in reasonable reviews and solid viewership, but the franchise seems to be on a quick path to mediocrity. Its quality is dipping, and there’s no where this is more apparent than on Disney Plus. The latest MCU series to launch on the platform — Secret Invasion — is considered a failure by pretty much everyone, ever, and its abysmal showing, both financially and in ratings, showcases just how far the giant has fallen.
This is perhaps best illustrated by a point recently made in Reddit’s Marvel Studios sub, where user Jaideco is busy examining the disparity between Secret Invasion and a far superior sci-fi offering. Strange New Worlds recently polished off its second season, and it continues to serve as a shining example of all the genre is capable of. Funny and charming, with a stellar cast and plenty of weird, wild, and thrilling sci-fi moments, the show makes many of its peers — and in particular Secret Invasion — look like child’s play, and viewers are taking notice.
Over the course of their post, Jaideco makes the argument that Strange New Worlds is a vastly superior show to Secret Invasion, despite boasting less than half the budget. According to their breakdown of the numbers, each season of Strange New Worlds contains 10 separate 55-minute episodes, which equals out to “an average of $7m per episode or $126,000 per minute of screen time.”
Secret Invasion, meanwhile, provided only three hours and 43 minutes of programming (an insanely low number for an entire television season) and cost a whopping $212m. That equals out to “$950,000 per minute of screen time.”
That’s a pretty major disparity in numbers, and considering the even bigger disparity in quality, it genuinely makes no sense. Just how, exactly, did Disney and Marvel manage to spend so much money on such a mediocre show? Jaideco polishes off their post with this exact question, along with a much more daunting one. Noting that “it should have been easily possible to provide double the run time or two equivalent shows for the price of Secret Invasion,” they openly ponder “what is going wrong here and what can Marvel do to fix this in phase 5?”
The answer to the latter may well be “nothing,” but commenters still listed a few potential avenues. The overarching answer to the question of why Secret Invasion, among others, was so terrible seems to be a lack of quality control, and far too much output. The MCU seems entirely focused on quantity over quality at the moment, and we’ve noticed. It’s not hard, when a fresh disappointment is hitting the small screen every other month.
Then there’s potential fixes. Answers to this particular conundrum are few and far between, and generally seem to land on “do anything but what you’re currently doing.” In general, people seem to think that Marvel and Disney are doing such a bad job they can’t possibly do worse. Any change is bound to help those televised MCU releases — but really, is anything enough to bring them up to the quality of Strange New Worlds?
Published: Aug 24, 2023 02:48 pm