Disney+, 2020, and the Surge of Streaming

Hey, we’re talking television again. Can streaming be called television? Bah, who cares, roll the tapes!

The sheer insanity this show promises has been the one thing keeping me invested in Marvel through 2020.

So, a week ago now, Disney held their Investor's Day, where they announced their new major projects and gave easy headlines to a few dozen bloggers. A lot of the fanbases I am a part of went crazy for these wide-reaching slates, and the promises they offered. I, to my surprise, was not among them. Partly, it was emotional overload to have so many projects announced on one day, and partly, I was still in a stir because Taylor Swift had just announced a follow-up to folklore, to release later that day. There are many other reasons, but there’s one particular question that probed me as the event drew to a close. As an example, the Star Wars panel announced a lot of new projects – but only one of those projects was a movie. The rest were all Disney+ shows.

It's wild to think this was six years ago.

This was a shock to me. I distinctly remember the day that Kevin Feige stood up and revealed the titles of the entire Marvel slate for phase three of the cinematic universe. This was 2014, before Age of Ultron came out, and promised movies all the way to 2019. Maybe Feige knew something about 2020 that we didn’t. That announcement felt incredibly surreal and was like a godsend to high school me. Dr. Strange? Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel? Black Panther, and he’ll be in a Civil War adaption! Incredible. But as time has passed, my desire for big long-reaching promises has lessened. With the release of Avengers: Endgame, I’ve been satisfied with the MCU, and the long gap since the release of Spider-Man: Far From Home has kind of cemented that. I’m still interested in future MCU projects, but it’s increasingly hard to invest in anything that we won’t hear more of for several years. Another Dr. Strange movie sounds cool, for sure, but considering the movie is an incalculable number of years away, it’s hard to care quite yet.

But there’s a huge difference between the 2014 announcement and the one from last week. At the same time as the 2014 D23 conference, Daredevil’s first season was deep in production, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was well into its second season, yet only the films were at the forefront of the Marvel slate. Not so in 2020. While there was some talk of the third Ant-Man, the future plans for Black Panther, and a distant announcement of a Fantastic Four movie, the majority of the conference was centered around what was coming to Disney+. There were new trailers for Wandavision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki, a sizzle reel for Ms. Marvel, and a ton of new show announcements, both featuring new characters and drawing from old ones. Armor Wars with War Machine, Secret Wars with Nick Fury, Ironheart, She-Hulk, Moon Knight, etc. The Star Wars panel announced one single movie and then talked about ten Disney+ shows.

This is wild, and I’m surprised I haven’t seen more people talking about it. As a fan of the aforementioned Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Marvel’s Netflix shows, I grew used to the television shows playing second fiddle to the big movies. But suddenly, they are the big features, and the movies are some distant dream.

I’m tempted to ask ‘wait, why is this?’ but there is an obvious answer. Welcome to 2020, baby.

While I hardly want to label this as ‘the year the movie died,’ it’s looking less and less like an exaggeration. The week before, Warner-Bros announced that all of their theatre releases for 2021 would come out in tandem with those films’ online releases on HBO Max. Meaning, broadly, that audiences will encounter these movies first through a computer screen and that a theatre viewing will, at best, be secondary. Writ large, the end result of this choice suggests a world where, if theatres can afford to exist, they will largely become a prestige event for film nerds and not a chance for a fun weekend event with friends. And this is after WB’s own Christopher Nolan strong-armed theatres open to release Tenet, bankrupting many of them. In short, WB forced theatres open in the midst of a pandemic and then announced that they were effectively screwing theatres out of their exclusivity. Instead of letting the horror of 2020 play out, and try to cut losses as much as possible, WB has pushed the theatre industry to the brink of bankruptcy. The outbreak of Covid-19 has put many movie productions in a perpetual standstill, and the industry’s response threatens to change the way we engage in movies from now on.

It's seriously wild the amount of things this show is doing on a technical level.

So, what does that have to do with the Disney announcement? Well, in short, the movie as a form of media isn’t profitable anymore. Not for the moment. The movie is a pain to make under present (necessary) restrictions, and a bigger pain to release. But the success of shows like The Mandalorian has revealed that the TV show still has a profitable market. The Mandalorian is particularly relevant, as despite its crazy production quality, much of the show isn’t shot on location. Rather, it’s shot with innovative new CGI tech that allows them to shoot with green-screen backgrounds done in-camera. Here’s a video where they explain the tech, and some of the wild implications. In brief, tech like this allows TV shows to function on a much higher scale than they’ve been able to before. Moreover, while 2019 was definitely a huge year for films, the dominance of shows like The Mandalorian, Watchmen, Chernobyl, Stranger Things, etc. in the conversation reveals just how relevant the TV show is in modernity. I’m increasingly fascinated by the presence of the TV show as an art form in the 21st Century with shows like Lost, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad receiving huge acclaim. With 2020, however, we’re seeing an unprecedented push as TV shows aim to become the dominant form of media. There’s room for some exaggeration there, but there’s also evidently some truth – and Disney seems to be counting on it.

I love TV, but I can’t help but feel shocked by this development. Let’s take Star Wars. For the entirety of its existence as a franchise, Star Wars’ biggest hits have always been movies. The books and comics have had a wide and expansive canon, but were always secondary to the next big movie release. The Clone Wars and Rebels were always marketed towards younger audiences, despite their wide acclaim. George Lucas had been trying to put out a live-action Star Wars show since the release of The Revenge of the Sith in 2005, but only with The Mandalorian in 2019 have we finally see that dream come to fruition. Yet, now the tables have entirely turned. The huge conclusion to the films, The Rise of Skywalker had a… lukewarm reception, but The Mandalorian is almost universally beloved, even by people who have never watched the show. Now we have two spin-offs of the show confirmed, a few spin-offs featuring movie characters, and a sparse few new stories. The only movie announced was a Rogue Squadron (which I am extremely excited for), a movie that sounds broadly unconnected from the central nine movies. I’ve long wondered what the game plan for Star Wars was going to be; there’s no Thanos figure to build to, no culminating conclusion. But without a huge film franchise, there’s no real ingrained need to build towards anything. A TV show isn’t necessarily expected to have the same kind of conclusion as a film franchise. There might even be some degree of antipathy to such a conclusion.

Marvel please bring back Charlie Cox he was so perfect in this role.

To explain that, let’s go back to Marvel’s Netflix outings. The broad goal was sort of Marvel’s Phase 1 writ large; introduce a bunch of characters in their respective shows and then toss them together in a big climactic team-up show. But Defenders, the conclusion of Marvel Netflix’s Phase 1… kind of flopped. And there are a lot of reasons for that, but I have to wonder if part of that failure is that we’re just not interested in that sort of continuity from a set of TV shows. We’re fine with letting the shows largely live their own lives. It’s cool to see Daredevil hang out with Jessica Jones, but we’ve already spent thirteen hours with both of these characters and we don’t seem to need that sort of synthesis in the same way that we might expect with movies. The sort of universe Disney+ aims to build with its shows has already been done in, say, the DC CW shows, which feature huge fun crossovers once a year. These crossovers always fall in this middle of a season; they’re a fun event, not a conclusion. Even before then, Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis had crossovers and shared lore, but their tensions and climaxes were clearly separate. No one clamored for a big Stargate cross-over movie, they wanted separate conclusions for each show.

So, in a world where planning for the future is practically impossible, and we’re dealing with two major franchises that just had huge summative conclusions, TV is the perfect medium to transition to. Plenty of shows are made with a specific set of seasons planned, but many more are created with intentionally open premises that writers can spend years and years exploring. The Mandalorian is broadly a western about a tin can and his nameless puppet, we don’t necessarily need a clear end goal (though I would really like one, please). In many ways, the present attempt to make everything a cinematic universe has its roots in long-form television anyways, so it makes sense to invest fully in that idea. If we don’t have the certainty to invest in a huge movie production, let’s make shows instead. They don’t cost as much, and they draw out audience participation. 2019 also showed us that, while Netflix’s model of dropping an entire season at once is fun, shows like Game of Thrones and The Mandalorian will always dominate the conversation by releasing week-to-week. Stranger Things made a big splash in the summer of 2019, and then quickly faded away to the discussions around Watchmen or Chernobyl. While movies likely have even more pop-culture longevity, long-form television is a powerful tool to hold audience attention. Imagine a world where The Mandalorian dropped an entire season in the fall or was a single movie – people would have talked about it for a while, and then probably moved on to whatever the next thing was. But the weekly release turned Baby Yoda into a marketing machine, something so ingrained in the modern pop-culture psychosis that a lot of the people going crazy for Baby Yoda don’t even watch the show.

The one new show I am interested in is The Acolyte, which also is unfortunately the one we know the least about.

Alright, alright, so what’s my problem with all this? Why am I so hesitant? Well, I guess my biggest fear is oversaturation. I mentioned earlier in the article how I’ve sort of come to terms with the MCU. I’ve long thought about writing an article about this gap year that Marvel is having. Despite my love for these movies, I can’t help but feel in retrospect that a large part of my enjoyment was about being part of the pop-culture wave. There was a momentum to the MCU, a sense that you needed to watch every movie on opening night to avoid spoilers and the feeling that it was all building to something. But with that momentum gone, I just don’t have nearly as much interest in future movies. I wasn’t waiting with bated breath for Black Widow or anything, though I like the idea of Disney finally using their money to get weird with movies like The Eternals. But while a movie is a fun, two-hour event where you go to one of those theatres that used to exist and have fun with the friends, TV shows are, once again, longer investments. If you want in on the pop-culture train, you’re now locking yourself into an hour a week – and that’s assuming these shows don’t run concurrently, which they almost certainly will. The math just adds up, and it’s a little exhausting.

If nothing else, this show is certainly gorgeous.

I guess this is where I finally come out and say that I don’t really adore The Mandalorian. I think it’s fun, and I think it’s fine. I get the appeal, I really do. But it’s a show with a faceless protagonist and his voiceless sidekick, as they spend week-to-week going from one place to the next with scarcely any development of plot and character. And a lot of people enjoy that, and that’s fine. I think this season has vastly improved on season one, so that’s great (and yes, this is going up on the same day as the season finale, so yay synergy, I guess). I can enjoy it, but I don’t love it. It feels soulless and corporate and boring because nothing is ever at stake. Which is fine, but I get sad when I look at all these new shows that were announced and realize that Disney is just going to make a dozen The Mandalorians. Two of the announced Star Wars shows were spinoffs of The Mandalorian, and neither of them feature characters I really want to see that much more of. The Marvel shows seem to be made up mostly of characters who should have gotten more love years ago, and that execs are now trying to make up for. There’s just so much coming, and none of it seems to have any sort of spark of life to it. If we’re killing the movie, I at least wish we’d do it for a good cause.

I mentioned at the beginning of this article that the conference was kind of emotional overload for me – but that’s not really the right term. Because none of the announcements excited me. Well, okay, the Rogue Squadron movie floored me and I’m ecstatic that Patty Jenkins is at the helm, I’ve only wanted a Rogue Squadron movie my entire childhood. But none of the shows excited me, or even really intrigued me. What I felt last Friday wasn’t emotional overload, so much as it was information overload. A sense of being worn down into a tired apathy from the sheer wave of announcements. I like Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christenson getting a second chance to play Obi-Wan and Anakin, but… is that show going to mean anything? I love that we’re finally fleshing out Bucky and Falcon, and I love that we’re finally giving Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye run a whirl, but why couldn’t we have done that years ago when these characters felt like they were going somewhere? Why was it so hard to get an Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. or a Daredevil cameo before? I guess it feels weird because it seems like these shows are all directed exactly to my demographic (white, young male) but I don’t want any of them. These are all announcements I would have gone crazy for in high school, but now I just really want to watch The Last Jedi and Winter Soldier or Thor: Ragnarok again, because they felt like the last time these franchises had real creative energy. In a surprise twist, right now the projects I’m most excited for are from DC; James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad and Matt Reeve’s The Batman seem like genuinely exciting projects with a lot of directorial passion behind them. In contrast, Disney’s shows were all announced off of brand-recognition, not on anyone in the writing or directing staff. Hawkeye’s showrunner was the writer for Mad Men, and this second is literally the first I’m hearing about it. What’s with that?

I may not be ecstatic for the full slate, but I'm definitely here for this crazy show.

I’m happy for the people who are really excited about all these announcements. I honestly am. I stood in your shoes six years ago, and it’s a hell of a feeling. But I’m not there anymore. I’ll probably watch the lion’s share of these shows, and with luck, I’ll enjoy a lot of them. That said, and maybe it’s the 2020 in me, but I just can’t get excited for them right now. Blank, corporate logos with vague promises don’t interest me, I can just hope that they turn into something more. TL;DR, announce the Rian Johnson Star Wars trilogy, cowards. I can’t shill for you under these conditions!