Marvel's Disney+: Recapturing the Lightning

For context of how busy I’ve been, I originally thought of writing this for the finale of Wandavision, and now an entire other show has been released.

There are a total of like, five high-quality stills of "Falcon and Winter Soldier," and this is one of them, I guess

I’ve been following the Marvel Cinematic Universe for some time now. For much of that time, it has been something of a media giant. Notably, the build-up to 2012’s The Avengers has all but popularized the ‘cinematic universe’ model: a series of individual movies with their own characters, eventually building into a big team-up narrative.

While the MCU certainly made this model popular, it seems increasingly clear that Marvel had something of lightning in a bottle. Despite the various attempts from various studios, no one has really had the success that Marvel has had. An earlier iteration of this article looked more like a comparison between Marvel and Star Wars and their different trajectories in ‘creating a cinematic universe,’ but that iteration wound up being more summary than analysis. In any case, Marvel’s continued success is nigh-unprecedented, still dominating theatres nearly ten years after the release of The Avengers (dear lord, it’s almost been ten years). Back when theatrical releases were still a thing, Endgame was a smash-hit culmination of the entire franchise in a year where the big franchise endings had mostly been flops. Marvel had already planned for there to be a bit of a break between Endgame and their future releases, but that break was extended due to Covid-19. In the following gap, there has been nothing but time to reflect on what worked for the MCU – and what, perhaps, didn’t work.

Their chemistry is so infectious. Wandavision is a perfect closed miniseries, but I also wouldn't say no to a full-on Marvel sitcom somehow

In my conversations through the past year, it seems unanimous that Marvel had momentum on its side. While the characters were loveable and charming, there was a sense that you went to the theatres and saw whatever the new MCU movie was partly to be up-to-date with the cultural conversation. Because of the severity of spoiler-culture, and the quick-acting nature of meme-culture, missing the first week of a given movie’s release was about as good as missing the movie entirely. Now that the momentum was gone, it felt hard to really be invested in the franchise at large anymore. Perhaps it is for this reason that Marvel’s efforts into television weren’t as well-received. While Daredevil and Jessica Jones received a decent amount of acclaim, the majority of Marvel TV shows didn’t have the sheer cultural pressure behind them. Watching Runaways or Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. wasn’t going to be required reading for the next big movie, and neither show had the internal audience that a character like Captain America did, and so they slipped away into obsolescence. But in retrospect, Marvel’s failure to properly tap into the television market reflects a much bigger problem in the franchise’s structure.

See, for all intents and purposes, the MCU is a TV show writ large. It is expected that people see every episode or movie, and when strung together the movies fill out a single overarching narrative with all sorts of plot threads laying underneath. Particularly notable is the way that the MCU developed characters over ten years of movie releases. In some cases, they were successful; the majority of Endgame simply consists of the central characters reflecting on their development. But looking beyond the primary few characters, the MCU begins to appear sparse. Take Bucky Barnes: Bucky appeared briefly as Steve Roger’s sidekick in The First Avenger, before becoming a primary plot focus of both Winter Soldier and Civil War, and then… was regulated back to the background. Even in the two movies where he was the focus, he received relatively little characterization of his own, he was just important to the plot because Steve thought he was important. Or Wanda Maximoff: Wanda had been a favourite character of mine (and according to Facebook Memories, I’ve wanted a Wanda & Vision romcom since 2016), but she didn’t really have anything going for her. She was just kind of cool. Her ‘arc’ was largely subliminal and subtextual, never anything really discussed on the surface. If your name wasn’t Steve or Tony (or Thor, towards the end), you’d be hard-pressed to find a figure of genuine focus and depth.

It feels so good to let Bucky actually joke around a little for once

The MCU had taken up the events-driven model of the comics, where every few years a big event would force all the characters together, but without the space the comics had to focus on each character individually, those events began to ring hollow. I like Civil War a lot, but even I can acknowledge that it is barely managing to hold together under the weight of all the characters it has to justify. Infinity War manages even worse – the only character who really gets any focus is Thor. Thus, when we get to the conclusion of Endgame, we return to the apprehension that I and a lot of my friends have felt in the past year. The movies have spent most of their time focusing on a small set of characters – but now those characters are out of the picture. Does the MCU really have any lasting power on its own merits?

Enter Disney+ – Marvel’s golden ticket into the next phase of the MCU. While Marvel had previously kept a clear distance between the movies and the TV shows, Disney+ allowed for the sort of budgets that would allow full integration of movie characters into a TV format. Moreover, by allowing these characters to exist in the space of a 6–9-episode mini-series as opposed to a two-hour movie, there would be significantly more room for depth of both character and narrative. Translating the long-form narratives of comic books is hard to do in a movie series, but the transition to television is much smoother. It’s only natural, then, that Marvel’s first few shows on Disney+ are some of the best stories the MCU has offered yet.

I don't get to talking about either of these characters in the article but they're both great and I'm excited to see where the MCU takes Rambeau.

Both Wandavision and The Falcon & the Winter Soldier have allowed their respective characters to actually breathe for once; both by giving them space to exist, and by giving them actual voices. While Wanda, Vision, Sam, and Bucky all felt like relatively blank slates in the movies they appeared in, in their respective shows they’ve all been finally allowed to express hopes, dreams, fears, weaknesses. We’ve known that Wanda has been a growing well of trauma, but she’s never been able to actually reveal how that has affected her until now. Sam Wilson has essentially been comic relief since his first movie, but now we’re able to spend time with him and his family and get a sense of why he does anything he does. Bucky Barnes is finally a character and not just a plot device. With all of that room, we actually get to see their respective actors act. Elizabeth Olson already has a fairly impressive resume behind her, but it feels good to see that talent actually put to use in the MCU. That goes double for Paul Bettany, who’s had to hide his comedic chops between a disembodied voice and a philosophical robot. I’ve always liked these characters, but at long last, I feel like I’m able to genuinely enjoy them, not just think they’re neat on a sort of superficial level.

If that was all the shows did, I would be satisfied – but to my surprise, Marvel has also dared to have their shows go beyond any of the narratives of the movies. For the first time, it feels like the MCU is able to have extended conversations about… anything. Marvel movies definitely had clear themes and relevant messages in the past; Winter Soldier gestured towards government surveillance and enforcement, Thor: Ragnarok had a surprising anti-colonial message, and beneath all the fun Iron Man III had a lot to say about both PTSD and the war on terror. But those themes always felt like subtext to the fun hero action happening in the forefront. Winter Soldier sets the dominoes by talking about the problems of state power, but by the end of the movie, the bad guys are Nazis and any sense of nuance slips away.

An absolutely bone-chilling image.

There is definitely a sense where the Disney+ shows have been accused of similar problems, and I think that’s fair, but I also think they’ve been able to handle their respective conversations with a great deal more success than any of the movies have. Wandavision tenderly and poignantly elaborates on the potent power of unresolved grief. Grief becomes the true antagonist of the show and continues to haunt Wanda even as the final episode comes to a close. In Wandavision, grief creates and distorts; it makes a villain of our best intentions. More than anything else, grief warps our perspective of the places and people around us. Wanda ends the show by beginning to reconcile with herself, but she still has a long way to go to reconcile with the broader world.

I went into The Falcon & the Winter Soldier expecting a fun action buddy-cop show, but what I got instead was a surprisingly perceptive discussion of institutional power through the lens of Captain America’s legacy. The shield becomes a symbol for all the strengths and sins of America. It is up to Sam Wilson to navigate that complicated legacy, just as it is up to the viewer to reconcile with the complicated past of their own nation. Do you brush the horrors of one’s past under the carpet, do you waste away within the hopelessness of a corrupt system, or do you stand up to try and do something about it? These questions run deep in The Falcon & the Winter Soldier. In many ways, a few key arcs strike me as rushed, and I wish the show had a few more episodes to expand on John Walker, Karli Morgenthau, or Baron Zemo. But the fact that the show even tried, that it went all-in for a conversation the MCU would never have been able to have, gives me a lot of hope for the future of Marvel’s Disney+ shows.

More Kathryn Hahn in everything, please.

I haven’t even yet talked about the way this episodic format allows for Wandavision to do half of what it does. I grew up on old sitcoms, and Wandavision’s ability to play along with the comfortable format, only to violently subvert it for a visceral emotive effect, is something totally unprecedented in the MCU thus far. After spending so long waiting for Marvel to break out of its formula and get really experimental, Wandavision was a welcome relief. Even while The Falcon & the Winter Soldier felt more like the typical Marvel fare, its episodic format allowed for greater depth in all the ways I’ve always talked about. What’s more, by releasing onto Disney+ and involving major movie characters, it seems like these shows have finally given Marvel TV a sway in the cultural conversation. I easily saw more conversation about either of these shows from week to week than I ever saw about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., or even Daredevil. Lastly, it finally feels like these shows will actually have a shelf-life in the broader movie universe. I’m still secretly hoping that Daisy Johnson shows up in a movie somewhere, but at least I know that Wanda or Bucky’s character developments will actually affect future films in some way. The next time they show up on the big screen, I’ll finally be seeing lived-in characters, not just cardboard cut-outs.

It doesn’t seem like they show any interest in slowing down, either. Tom Hiddleston recently described Loki, a show I had just sort of shrugged off, as being centrally about, like, disparate self-narratives? Which sounds ridiculously cool and way more introspective than I was expecting. At this rate, they’ll even squeeze some amount of depth from What If. Not to mention that the first glimpses of Shang-Chi and The Eternals look like a breath of air for the MCU movies. Perhaps Phase 4 will be better than any of us gave credit for.

Here's to Phase 4.

In any case, I'm excited to have big relevant things to talk about again. Between the lack of movies releasing to theatres and the busyness of the final year of my undergrad, this website has been a little quiet. Technically two years of Frankly Speaking is coming up, but updates have been so sparse I won't bother with a write-up like I did last year. Instead, hang tight, and hopefully in the next while updates will be a little more frequent.