When it comes to Marvel’s foray onto Disney Plus, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general lately, it seems the franchise is suffering from a case of quantity over quality. Two recent examples can be found in the film Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and the series Secret Invasion, both of which failed to impress fans or critics.
On the other hand, two smaller-scale TV movies released in the past year continue to enjoy having a stellar reputation; the Marvel Special Presentations Werewolf by Night and The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special. Each of the specials, which were both released in 2022, ran for less than an hour and yet retain impressively high Certified Fresh ratings on Rotten Tomatoes — at 89 percent and 94 percent, respectively. I think doing more specials like this – in place of being trigger-happy with greenlighting six-part series or churning out middling sequel after middling sequel – could be a smarter choice for Marvel Studios to course-correct the MCU.
For one thing, even though we don’t have hard numbers on the budgets for either of the Marvel Special Presentation projects, it seems obvious they must’ve been cheaper to make than either Secret Invasion‘s $200 million price tag, or Quantumania‘s budget of around the same. In fact, the way James Gunn intelligently filmed the Holiday Special to overlap with that of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, which reportedly boosted the former’s production value, could serve as a model that Marvel may adopt as a template to slash spending on out-of-control budgets in the future, while still churning out content for Disney Plus.
In fact, the Holiday Special sets up an interesting paradigm that positions it as a prologue to Guardians Vol. 3, the latter of which was a box office smash hit, as Gunn explained to The Hollywood Reporter:
“I shot them simultaneously. One of the great benefits of the special was being able to introduce elements into the movie that I don’t have to then explain at the beginning of the movie, such as Cosmo the Spacedog [Maria Bakalova] or the fact that they live in the Head of Knowhere, their new residence, or introducing their spaceship, the Bowie, which, in real life, is this four-story set. It’s the most amazing set I’ve ever been on, and so we were able to utilize those sets that we had the money to build for Vol. 3, in the special. We otherwise wouldn’t have had that type of money to build these million-dollar sets.”
This just seems like a smart use of not only budgeting, but marketing, too. Though viewing numbers aren’t available for the Holiday Special, you could make the argument the entire TV movie served as a promotion for Guardians 3, perhaps helping it amass the $845 million it attained at the worldwide box office.
Compare that to Secret Invasion, which is the cost of an entire movie onto itself, and it seems like an utter misfire in terms of not feeling like some kind of promotion for The Marvels. Rather than resembling the colorful, bubbly forthcoming Nia DaCosta-directed film that we’ve seen in trailers so far, Secret Invasion felt like it was trying to relive the glory days of Marvel’s past by recreating the dour tone of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
What’s more, Werewolf by Night proves that Marvel Special Presentations could be a viable avenue for introducing out-of-left-field Marvel characters that are relatively obscure and not recognized by the general public. The special debuted a werewolf character portrayed by Gael García Bernal, as well as the creature known as Man-Thing. This was an opportunity Marvel used to get more experimental with its storytelling, with the decidedly gothic tone proving to be a crowd-pleaser for both critics and audiences.
Imagine if Marvel applied the mentality of treating their specials as setups for movies, they could do two or three stand-alone TV movies with obscure characters and then have them cross over on the big screen with a movie, Avengers-style, should they become popular enough. And if the experiment doesn’t work? Well, no biggie, they were inexpensive to make in the first place, so Marvel Studios could simply pull out of the approach if it isn’t resonating with audiences in terms of translating to viewership numbers.
Personally, I would much rather see Marvel get more experimental and ambitious — and yet on a smaller scale — with a slew of micro-budgeted TV movies rather than see another bloated failed MCU movie idea stuffed with filler episodes and dumped on Disney Plus, like what we got this Secret Invasion.
Imagine if Marvel had the foresight to cut the runtime of Quantumania to only a third of the theatrical version, while also slashing the budget by that amount, and giving audiences a concise, contained adventure that gave us a taste of Jonathan Major’s Kang the Conqueror, but left us thirsty for more. I have the feeling a 45-minute version of the same story would have been better received in the long run, especially since the film’s over-reliance on the Volume for its CGI backgrounds made it look like a TV movie anyway.