You can hear it already. Disney is watering down its Marvel content with too many shows. Disney is ruining Star Wars. How about something besides comic book movies and sci-fi? Hey, you know what? Maybe Disney Plus is not your thing. But for 89 million people as of Disney’s Investor Day presentation, it seems to be working out very well. Disney rolled out announcements about future movies, Hulu, International expansion, including new series like one starring John Stamos as a girls basketball coach and a new series based on The Mighty Ducks. But key to its strategy going forward, both on the big and small screen, is content centered around Marvel and Star Wars. Disney did not make the two brands central tenants of its new service to house archives.
There will be 10 new Disney+ series set in the Star Wars Universe and 10 new series set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That’s right. 20 new shows centered around two brands alone. Why? Because both brands have millions of fans around the world who want to soak up the content. That may not be you. And the good news is that there are millions of hours of content on multiple platforms that are not based on Lucas Films or Marvel. But for those that camp out on Reddit forums, Facebook groups, old fashioned message boards, the comment sections of comic-book and science fiction websites, and even your local comic shop, this kind of news should be a revelation.
Why would Disney build out so much content from Marvel and Star Wars? It’s simple really. Disney is growing narratives in the same way comic book companies like DC Comics and Marvel have done since at least the 1960s. At any given time for instance Marvel comics might have 10 publications featuring Spiderman. And when the company decides to launch a major storyline every title can be affected. Fans love to be absorbed into vast universes of stories and Marvel on its own has thousands of characters and alternative universes ripe to be explored through TV and film. There is an audience for it, but to build the kind of connected story, Marvel/Disney is aiming for there would never be enough oxygen in the film industry to tell the number of stories that could sustain it unless there was a new major motion picture every other week. The film industry could not have 10 movies out in one year featuring Spiderman. That would not be sustainable, nor would fans want to plunk down money that often.
But with Disney+ characters can be built and nurtured in TV shows and grow their brands and featured later in event movies when it makes sense instead of making the fatal error that so many movies have made where too many characters were dropped into one movie so that nothing felt fleshed out. For instance, let’s take a character like Hawkeye “Clint Barton”. Over the course of the Marvel movies, we learned that he has a family and lives on a farm. That was built in so that when the family disappears and re-appears in Avengers End Game the scenes carried more weight. It made his loss and grief seem very real, even more than the people later shown at a support group. In fact, as soon as Barton appeared with his family at the start of the movie the entire packed theater gasped because they knew what was coming. But for all of the characters in the movie, very few others were shown with their families. When Barton’s wife calls after the world is brought back, only the hardest of hearts don’t weep for joy. Why? Because we know who he is other than the guy with the bow and arrows. But this was built in over time.
Disney now has the time and space to do that across its tentpole brands so that if someone sacrifices themselves in a movie the audience will understand the scope of the sacrifice. Iron Man is dead, “aww his poor daughter”. Did anybody cry when they saw Alderaan destroyed in Star Wars? Nope. We don’t know anyone who lives on Alderaan. You better believe some people cried when Han Solo died. We have known him for 40 years. This is not a technique just to make on-screen deaths more meaningfull.
Starwars has been with us since 1977. And for 20 years we only saw 1 story about essentially 5-10 characters. Later we saw a whole story built around 1 character that takes place over 3 movies. Yet there was an entire set of characters, descendants, and sects being created through novels and comic books. My brother in law has read at least 40 of the Star Wars based novels. And in the Rise of Skywalker when one pilot who was on screen as few as 5 times over the course of three movies died, he said “OH No Not Him” Because unlike many in the audience he knows his back story. From now on in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and a Galaxy far far away fans will be able to get to know so much more. On-screen characters have never had the depth of storytelling that characters in print have, but with the direction Disney is going, they will. They will be able to take creative risks without losing at the box office and gauge audience expectations might be ahead of time. Oh, and they will probably be able to sell a lot more toys and video games too.
