The finally dropped this week, a full two-and-a-half years after the Disney+ series was initially announced back in November 2021. But the actual date we should be considering is February 2021, when the ditty that gave the series its name — and that went viral enough that Disney thought it worthwhile to greenlight the spinoff — appeared in an episode of WandaVision. The set-up and the punchline are well over three years a൩part.
Three Years And A World Of Difference For The MCU
A lot has changed for the MCU in that time. In 2021, Marvel was still sowing. Avengers: Endgame had conquered the box office, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man: No Way Home was about to do the same (in the midst of a global pandemic). The MCU had successfully made the transition from movies to streaming TV, with WandaVision putting up💎 the biggest numbers yet for a Disney+ series, only for its record to be beaten by another MCU show, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
Deadpool & Wolverine Better Not Make Us All Care About The MCU🏅 Again
2023 mostly gave us a break froꦯm MCU dominance and it would be a shame to see it take over pop culture again.
Those two series, along with Loki which followed that summer, successfully translated the MCU's monocultural presence to TV. WandaVision was constantly in the conversation on social media. It wasn’t just must-see TV but, thanks to the pandemic keeping films out of theaters, the only must-see anything going on in media. The most successful film franchise in history had extended its footprint to TV without losing any of its potency.
Well, that was how it seemed for those first few shows. Just as the movies fed into the TV, the TV soon fed into the movies. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness carried Wanda's arc over from WandaVision, leading audience members to feel like they were expected to keep up with all the TV shows, an even more unreasonable ask than keeping up with dozens of movies.
The MCU's Streaming Stumble
Doctor Strange 2 was the last Marvel movie to come close to making a billion dollars, with a $955.8 million worldwide gross. I don't think it's too conspiratorially minded to suggest that its success sowed the seeds of the MCU's decline. It's the most successful post-No Way Home MCU movie, and to the wide audience that saw it, it communicated the need to do their streaming homework if they wanted to keep up with the ongoing movie narrative. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever didn't do much to quash that narrative, with multiple characters brought over from streaming TV or introduced with the goal of spinning off in their own series.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was a hit, but it got beaten out at the global box office by Barbie, The Super Mario Bros., and Oppenheimer. And the other MCU movies that have hit theaters since Doctor Strange 2 have seen diminishing returns. Black Panther 2 made a half-billion dollars less than its predecessor, Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania underperformed, and The Marvels outright flopped. Disney's streaming strategy had backfired, and its box office faced the consequences.
Agatha All Along, an expensive streaming spin-off based on the viral success of an in-show song, is an artifact of that earlier hubris. Disney, buoyed by the success of WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, thought that it could make anything a success. It had plenty of evidence to back that up. Characters that only die-hard comic book fans had heard of, like the Guardians of the Galaxy, had spawned massive blockbusters, and second-stringers like Captain Marvel, Doctor Strange, and Ant-Man had enjoyed similar success. Why shouldn't it greenlight an Agatha spin-off?
Three years later, here we are. No one is talking about newer MCU Disney+ shows like Echo. Secret Invasion, got attention for a bad reason: its title sequence's use of generative AI. Agatha All Along could break through — who could root against Kathryn Hahn and Aubrey Plaza? — but it's like a cry for help beamed in from another galaxy – reaching us far too late to make much of a difference.
MCU, Games, And Taylor Swift - A Match Made In Heaven O🐈r Hell?
This trio should be a cast iron hit. I🍬'm not s🔯ure it is.
