Out of all of the streaming services, Disney Plus
has had one of the most rocky roads from launch and it turns out that the behind the scenes of
the platform is a lot more dire than we could have imagined. I’ve been gearing up to do an overall
Disney Plus breakdown video, but the thing that really springboarded this into existence is a
new article released by The Hollywood Reporter that sheds light on a lot of major issues
behind the scenes that have been negatively impacting MCU shows. So I’ll be covering a lot of
information revealed from this article while also rounding up numerous other articles that go
into the controversies behind the scenes. And I’ll link all this information into general big
issues with Disney Plus’ content strategy for the MCU and Star Wars. So the first and most damning
revelation brought up by The Hollywood Reporter is that none of the MCU shows have had actual
showrunners. First, I should probably describe the role of a showrunner because it can get a little
confusing as to who’s in control of the creative vision given so many positions like directors,
writers, producers, and executive producers that have a say in how a show is made. The showrunner
essentially has full creative authority over a series and manages every aspect about a show from
the writing, filming, and editing. And it’s up to them if they want to personally be involved with
writing and directing certain episodes. Producers and executive producers are technically higher on
the food chain, but their creative input entails finding people to work on a project and supervise
the process to see if everything is running smoothly and is also on budget. However, Marvel on
the other hand didn’t even bother with acquiring showrunners. They generally approached directors
and asked them to pitch shows and they were normally not heavily involved with the writing
process. The primary director of Moon Knight, Mohamed Diab, said he was “approached out of the
blue” by Marvel and asked for him to pitch the series. From here, they didn’t actually make him
the showrunner and brought on more creatives to help lighten the workload. Luckily, Moon Knight is
an example of this actually working to a degree, but a bad example where this was a similar case
was Secret Invasion. Now it was largely a mystery as to why Secret Invasion was so expensive and
looked the least remarkable and most cheap of the MCU shows. But it turns out that the show
was utterly plagued with production issues and had a staggering four months of reshoots.
Along with the producers bringing on a new writer during that period to write new material.
So they essentially re-made a solid chunk of Secret Invasion in that time. To go into more
detail behind the scenes for Secret Invasion, the worrying signs started with Kyle Bradstreet
writing scripts for the show for almost a year, until Marvel spontaneously decided that they
wanted to take the show in a different direction and drop kicked him out of the series. They hired
a few directors and a new writer and allegedly none of them got along during pre-production. It
was an absolute shitstorm as this unproductive crew worked inefficiently and by a certain point,
they were burning through their allotted schedule to the point that they lost one of the directors
due to scheduling conflicts, forcing Ali Selim to now direct every episode. On top of most of the
people working on the show getting replaced. The Marvel executive who was overseeing Secret
Invasion upsetted the company so much to the point that his contract will not be getting renewed. So
Secret Invasion was an absolute nightmare behind the scenes and I think is one of the straws that
broke the camel's back for Marvel in realizing that this model is not sustainable. Along with it
fundamentally delivering a worse product because by having so many conflicting creative opinions,
the show will feel like a mess as everyone tries to get on the same page. Secret Invasion was
this hideous Frankenstein baby that failed to deliver on the premise of the show and was this
weird mash-up of crappy spy espionage, half-assed paranoia, and so much more that I dive into for
a twenty-minute video I’ll put in the end screen if you’re interested. Then there’s also the issue
that Disney didn’t hire on more Marvel executives to oversee TV shows that suddenly landed on
their doorsteps because of Disney Plus. Instead, the existing executives working for Marvel had
to split their time between the movies and the shows. Which this piece of information to me is
a major reason why Marvel has quickly been going off a cliff in terms of quality. They essentially
doubled their output of Marvel content over night and they were clearly not ready to handle the
massive amount of work. Because before this they had 2 to 3 movies a year they had to worry
about, along with those movies just being around two hours. So actually, they more than tripled
the amount of content they had to worry about because the shows generally run for around 4 to
5 hours. Like you’d probably be surprised if I told you in 2021 Disney Plus released five MCU
shows. At a certain point there must have been well over a dozen Marvel projects being worked on
at a single time. From here, Kevin Fiege probably couldn’t be as involved as he would want to be
with most of these projects. It seems like he put his faith in the creatives, despite there not
being showrunners. So scripts clearly deteriorated and there have been a plethora of writing problems
on almost every MCU project coming up, especially Blade which seems to be in a perpetual hell of
writing. Now the proof that points to Kevin Fiege most likely not having enough supervision over MCU
content is what just happened with Daredevil Born Again. This event was the major talking point
of the Hollywood Reporter article. It reveals Marvel firing all the writers and directors on the
series because Fiege disliked the direction and quality of the show. Funnily enough, the writers
strike actually gave Fiege some breathing room and allowed him to fully review the first
4 episodes that were shot before production shut down. And since he didn’t like what he saw,
which apparently Matt Murdoch doesn’t actually put on his suit until episode 4 and was just a legal
drama basically, he hit the reset button on the show. So thankfully this strike led to more great
things besides giving writers significantly better contracts. The strike saved a fan-favorite show
from possibly another Secret Invasion esque fate. Without the strike it’s likely that this show
would have continued shooting without a gauruntee as to whether it would’ve been good. Generally in
television you would make a pilot episode. Which would act as the first episode of the series that
you would then show to the producers to greenlight the rest of the season. Or if they didn’t
like the pilot, they’d save money and say no by not continuing production on the entire show.
Because it’s fundamentally better to lose money on 1 episode instead of funding a multi-hour long
failure. Marvel however didn’t do this and just greenlighted shows on the faith that the creatives
were hopefully competent enough to work on the project, the scripts were finished and passable,
and in general they started floating this notion that any issues they’d run into in production they
could fix in post. Which is an utter nightmare for anyone working in the industry. It leads
to a lazy form of filmmaking with not enough planning being done and it also sends VFX artists
into a frenzy because inexperienced directors are constantly making changes on already finished
shots with VFX. Or producers are finally seeing the finished product and are now throwing in their
own notes for changes. Thus adding to the budget and forcing those artists to crunch even more.
When people bash bad VFX in Marvel movies and is this major reason as to why these movies or
shows are bad, I just feel disconnected by the conversation because the artists making these
shots are actually very talented and are being rused to finish their work. Most people will
always point out the bad VFX, but to be fair they do deliver some genuinely great shots that
look incredible at times. It just unfortunately breaks your immersion when those occasional bad
shots do arise. Like it’s been reported that Marvel productions are regularly making changes
on their projects right up until the deadline. Which just seems insane to me because with proper
planning and pre-production that should never be the case. Your movie or show should be perfectly
planned out to the point that you don’t drive up the budget of the show while simultaneously
hurting quality. However, this takes time and since Marvel Studios essentially had a quota of
about 3 shows a year, they didn’t have the luxury of time so therefore the quality started to tank.
Even though it seems counterproductive to have a lack of planning and then go through months of
reshoots. All of this amalgamates into Marvel feeling more like a conveyer belt of content
instead of something that is more driven by creativity and passion. We do occasionally
get those shows like Loki and Moon Knight, but other shows like Wandavision which were good,
clearly had some really inconsistent patches like the ending that just felt like a complete mess.
Or the obvious elephant in the room that is Secret Invasion in which Marvel just tossed 200 million
dollars off to a group of creatives in the hopes that they’d return with a good show. So since
we’ve essentially assessed the absolute chaos behind the scenes at Disney Plus and why so
much of their content has been lacking, let’s now see how this impacts the streaming service
as a whole and the major issues that creates. Going into the biggest problem is that for
both Marvel and Star Wars, Disney is flooding the market with so much content to the point that
they are oversaturating and damaging their brand. Now this is a very nuanced subject that I’ll
elaborate on and there is definitely another side to this coin. And that side is what
James Gunn brings up in that people aren’t getting superhero fatigue and instead they are
getting bad writing or bad story fatigue. For me, I pretty much agree with this sentiment because
if we kept getting S-tier Marvel content like Winter Soldier, Thor: Ragnarok, and Guardians of
the Galaxy then people would be perfectly happy. Those movies were all refreshing and told
great stories that were imbued with so much creativity and love. And their follow-ups were all
generally pretty good and I feel like Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is living proof that people aren’t
fatigued by overall superhero movies. Like if I were to personally rank phase 4 it would look
something like this, and in comparison this is how I would rank the first 3 phases. Which is a
pretty depressing contrast. People are much more aware to the deteriorating quality of the content
to the point that reviews now make or break Marvel movies. That’s why Ant-Man Quantumania did poorly
at the box-office because critics and fans ripped that movie apart, leaving people on the fence
to either skip it entirely or wait until it comes out on Disney Plus. Despite Quantumania
having some hype marketing in that they were introducing Kang as the new big threat. So
this waning quality paired with a drastic uptick in content on Disney Plus is what’s
driving the community to this burnt out view. Then another aspect for the MCU in particular is
that the universe is exponentially expanding to an alarming degree with so many new characters and
plot threads to the point that it’s overwhelming. For every show they seemingly create more loose
ends than they do for plotlines they conclude. To go through some examples, WandaVision establishes
4 separate plotlines, some of which have no clear plan for the future like white vision being set
loose into the world, Hawkeye oddly sets up a lot of different plotlines, new characters some times
show up out of the blue like in She-Hulk where Hulk randomly has a son now, Secret Invasion
introduces the most overpowered character in the MCU who will show up at some other point
I guess, and even shows that are meant to be a mini-series end up concluding on a cliffhanger.
Actually looking back at Moon Knight I completely forgot that this character became a superhero.
Then this isn’t even bringing into account the usual end credit scene introductions for the
movies. At this point it feels like cutting off the head of a hydra in which when one story ends
two more take it’s place. On top of all of this being compounded by Disney Plus adding more wood
to the fire. This does vary per person because fans who watch every show or movie may not care as
much, but for casuals it’s really uninviting. You now have to ingest dozens of hours of content just
to understand where these characters came from. The Marvels as an example features two characters
that originated in two separate shows each over 4 hours long, so to understand the complexities and
context for these characters, you need to watch their shows. Or you have a situation like Doctor
Strange and the Multiverse of Madness where fans who didn’t watch WandaVision were confused about
why Wanda was suddenly a villain. The Marvels may not require you to watch Ms. Marvel and
WandaVision to understand these new characters, because they’ll probably re-introduce them in a
new way that’s digestible for casual moviegoers, but that notion will always be in the back of
your head that you are missing a part of their story. Because at the end of the day, you miss an
entire arc that these characters went on in their own shows. This state in comparison to the first
few phases were much more casual viewer-friendly. All we had were a small handful of characters that
took on conflict that wasn’t too overwhelming from an overarching story perspective. The dynamics
between these characters had a significant amount of depth and were all able to be explored to
a good extent. Like I’d honestly be surprised if we ever get a deeply personal moment again
where Tony Stark finds out that Bucky killed his parents. I know we're primarily in a phase
where we're setting things up again, but with so many more characters it’s hard to imagine
them getting back to that level of depth that we had between Iron Man and Captain America. Now,
I just shutter at the thought of anyone trying to write or direct the next Avengers movie because
the amount of characters has more than doubled. Infinity War did an excellent job balancing
out its cast of characters, but the question is will that still work for the next Avengers
movie if we bring in every single superhero we’ve been setting up. There’s almost no way
we can get back to that level of detail from the earlier phases because by doing that,
you’ll have to cut out a lot of screen time for other heroes. Which begs the question, why
introduce so many if they aren’t going to be that important later on? I know this is a comic book
thing where you have like a hundred characters, but I’d argue that’s more unsustainable in a
movie or show setting. People tend to want quality over quantity and the current track record for
Disney Plus has shown us that we can’t have both. Taking a look over at Star Wars, there are
obviously many issues for each project that generally have to do with the writing, but I
want to take a look at a larger problem with their shows on Disney Plus. And that’s the lack
of creative and new ideas for the franchise. Now there are very few like the Mandalorian, but even
that show has devolved into even bringing back likeable characters that in turn deteriorate their
strong payoff earlier in the story. Every single show essentially takes place within one time
period of the universe because that is where these recognizable characters are, and thus, more people
will pay to watch it. That’s just the sad truth because there’s nothing that will inherently draw
in tons of viewers right away if a show doesn’t have major recognizable characters in them. Like
Ahsoka as an example included Anakin Skywalker and the entire fandom lost their collective minds and
thought it was the best thing ever. So when Disney is at a crossroads of making original stories with
new characters or mining the nostalgia of fans with bringing back existing popular characters,
you can probably guess which path they will take. It more or less stifles creativity when you force
future stories through a bottleneck when there are so many other eras within the universe you can
explore. Disney has said that they are planning on doing that, but given that they are cutting
back on producing more shows it’s unclear how many we are really going to get given that Dave
Filoni and Jon Favreau are taking up a lot of the real estate. The Acolyte is promising but
that seems to still be far away. Besides that, the current state of Star Wars has been extremely
rough and the only show that has been truly great is Andor. And sadly that show didn’t perform well
because it didn’t have an iconic character backing it and it also probably hurts that people are
burnt out on the rebel storyline. Despite the show genuinely having some outstanding dramatic
writing. So we're at a point where the other half of content on Disney Plus has people mostly
tired of it and desperately wanting something new and refreshing. Also, it’s not necessarily a bad
thing to tell stories of existing characters like Obi-Wan. The issue however arises when someone
doesn’t have an original and great vision for the series and Disney forces and rushes the show
into existence. Or if they do have a good vision, Disney may step in and jerry rig it into a happy,
light hearted, mini-series when it was supposed to be a darker movie akin to Logan. Which in turn
angers the fans who want to love your franchise. This is essentially going into the next point in
that a lot of mini-series on Disney Plus feel like they would have been better suited to be movies.
At a certain point you have to ask yourself, is it better to have a 150 to 200 million dollar
budget for 6 to 8 episodes that have unnecessary elements and a slow pace, or just condense it
down to a solid 2 hour plus movie that is of a much higher quality. Because the production value
for a lot of these shows feels cheap at times and that really comes through for any action scene. It
has the rushed and lazy TV show feel and this is felt the most in Star Wars where lightsaber fights
are supposed to be elaborately crafted with great choreography, dynamic movements, awe-inspiring
settings, and more. But on a TV show schedule and budget, the creators probably don’t have enough
time and rehearsal to get footage that looks great. So to partially get around this, the action
is in turn not as high effort. Leading to what feels like an overall downgrade. Or narratively
a lot of these shows were initially being written as movies and then management busted through the
door and saw potential to up Disney Plus’ catalog. Examples being Obi-Wan and Secret Invasion. Maybe
then Secret Invasion could actually afford to include more characters within its story because
that kind of premise desperately needed more than just Rhodey and Everett Ross showing up. But the
reality is that these actors are very expensive so even though Secret Invasion has a large
budget, they sadly can’t afford a large roster of characters that the MCU has. Which does seem kind
of counterproductive in that you’ve introduced and brought in so many characters, but having
multiple of them in your shows or movies would be too expensive because their price tags are in
the millions. There are only a small handful of shows like WandaVision, Loki, She-Hulk despite my
dislike for it, and Andor that feel like they were specifically made for TV and if they were movies
it would only be a downgrade for their stories. They earn their time because every episode is
extremely productive in terms of its narrative and how it grows their characters. They have wide
sprawling and fun stories instead of something that is stretched out to fit 6 episodes. Looking
at you Jon Favreau. The Book of Boba Fett could have easily just been a movie and maybe then
they’d actually try to make their action scenes look half decent. This seems to primarily be the
management of who’s running these shows because when you look over at HBO, shows like House
of the Dragon that have a similar budget feel significantly better and of a higher quality than
anything Disney Plus has to offer. I used to think that it was just the directors who were butchering
these shows when in reality the fault probably goes much higher and wider than that. Although
some directors are clearly worse than others. Disney Plus does have their occasional gems, but
most of them seem to be isolated cases of Disney stumbling onto a passionate creator that genuinely
want to make something outstanding. Instead of their usual current affairs where the studio comes
up with an idea and finds someone to make it who doesn’t have a story that’s deeply engaging. The
crazy thing is this was essentially the inception of The Force Awakens where Disney forced a sequel
to happen and the writers had no idea what to do so they essentially just copied A New Hope. Were
at a point where people are starting to despise the two types of content that Disney Plus has
to offer, and this goes into my final point for Disney Plus’ overall issues. Which is simply,
Disney Plus only has Marvel and Star Wars content. They basically have no other high quality and
sought after original shows with unique stories that people want to watch. When you look at every
other platform, their most popular show tends to be an original series that balloons into having
immense popularity. Like Netflix having Stranger Things, Apple having Ted Lasso or Severance,
Amazon Prime having The Boys, and really any show on HBO at this point. But for Disney Plus?
They seem to be putting all of their eggs into two baskets and even shows that they do make like
Willow, that aren’t based on Marvel or Star Wars, they instantly cancel and immediately remove off
of their streaming service as if they were deeply embarrassed by it. Not saying that that show
was good or anything, I don’t think anyone even watched that show or wanted it. It just seems like
a baffling decision to give an obscure and niche IP its own show with a $100 million dollar budget.
Again going back to them probably needing to make pilots for their shows and having higher quality
assurance. Currently, the only big show coming out on Disney Plus that isn’t Marvel or Star Wars
related is another adaptation of Percy Jackson and the Olympians. I hope this show is good, but given
that Disney Plus has garnered a bad reputation for low quality shows, I’m not exactly excited for
this series when normally I would be. It’s kind of sad, but you can only disappoint fans for so long
until they cut ties to your streaming service. Which is pretty surprising considering that Disney
Plus has really only been around for a few years. So I don’t necessarily want to end this video
on a depressing and gloomy note of Disney Plus and the content they're making being terrible
because at least on the side of MCU content, they are making strides to do better. They’re
going to start hiring showrunners for upcoming shows who have a more consistent and creative
vision so that there isn’t a constant frenzy behind the scenes. They’re going to start hiring
more TV executives so that they aren’t stretched thin between movies and shows. It’s rumored that
Kevin Feige is going to start hiring more tried and tested talent instead of relative unknowns.
Mainly because by hiring new directors there’s a bit of uncertainty as to whether they will perform
well, so they end up needing to be supervised more. They’ve also seemed to be hiring more
experienced writers like Nic Pizzolato for Blade who was the writer for True Detective and Lee
Sung Jin for Thunderbolts who wrote Beef. So they probably won’t take another chance on someone like
Jeff Loveness again who wrote Ant-Man Quantumania. Because prior to that his primary experience
was writing some Rick and Morty episodes. Then finally they are going to start focusing on more
serialized TV. This means shows will be geared towards multiple seasons instead of mini-series
that are unsure about whether or not they’re getting another season. So these four changes will
hopefully lead to better and more fine-tuned shows on Disney Plus. The writing itself will still
be a major indicator for quality obviously, but at least the environment for making
this content won’t be so hospitable. Also, another major change coming to Disney Plus is that
it’s going to be combined with Hulu in an attempt to increase the value of the overall package. The
main reason this is happening is because Disney Plus hasn’t made any money since it started. It’s
been operating at a constant loss every quarter, some of which Disney has lost 500 Million to even
a billion dollars. This was honestly a pretty major revelation to me and it also seems that the
service is starting to go down a spiral in that, for the last two quarters they reported losses
for subscribers. Disney Plus does have over 146 million subscribers which is the third
highest so It’s kind of surprising that they are losing this much money. Probably points to
the behind-the-scenes of the service being even worse than what we just went over in this video.
So yeah, I’ll end it here since the video is getting really long and I didn’t want to go on an
unhinged MCU rant and wanted to provide some kind of new perspective. So hopefully this video was
informative in some way. Thank you for watching and check out my socials for Letterboxd,
Discord, and Patreon in the description.
