After an intergalactic, time-traveling war and a silly trip to Europe , the Marvel Cinematic Universe had a quiet 2020 , prompted by the pandemic and …
After an intergalactic, time-traveling war and a silly trip to Europe, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had a quiet 2020, prompted by the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. This year, the MCU had a mountain of content at the ready, leaning hard into TV via Disney Plus. New episodes of its five shows will have come out in 34 of the 52 weeks of the year. That’s 34 weeks of fan excitement, word-of-mouth recommendations, intense social media and old-school advertising. It’s an astounding blitz of content, and was likely essential in getting Disney Plus to hit 118.1 million subscribers within two years of launching. (Market leader Netflix has around 214 million after more than a decade.) We’ve had plenty of MCU TV shows before — Agents of SHIELD, Agent Carter, the six Netflix series and the truly terrible Inhumans — but their connections to the movies felt increasingly tenuous as their seasons wore on. They seemed to happen in tiny pockets of Marvel’s world, while the Avengers and their cinematic buddies explored the whole world. The Disney Plus shows changed all that. Each of the four live-action series picked up on plot threads left hanging after the events of Avengers: Endgame, meaning they feel utterly essential for fans. Much like the comic universe that spawned the MCU, we’ve hit the point where characters will move seamlessly between movies and shows. And unlike the one-shot effect of the movies, having the shows stretch over several weeks meant they were the stuff of (virtual) water cooler discussion for a far longer period. Marvel movies made their tentative return as well, with Black Widow launching simultaneously in theaters and on Disney Plus Premier Access. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Eternals hit theaters first, as will Spider-Man: No Way Home. Marvel kicked off its 2021 TV blitz through the medium’s tropes in the sitcom-inspired WandaVision, which ran from Jan.15 to March 5. It didn’t even feel much like a Marvel show at first, with the 1950s-style opening episode leaving us a bit clueless about what was going on. However, the show’s Marvel-ness gradually emerged over the course of its eight episodes, revealing how Wanda Maximoff’s grief over the death of her robot boyfriend Vision (seen in Avengers: Infinity War) led her to bewitch an entire town into taking part in her idyllic, TV-inspired fantasy existence. Fans also theorized relentlessly about who the show’s true villain was, believing that the devil himself must be pulling Wanda’s strings.
