Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany star in Wanda Maximoff and Vision in Marvel’s “WandaVision.”
Disney
Disney’s “WandaVision” is so powerful and popular that it looks like it withdrew the company’s streaming service on Friday.
Disney + experienced a brief outage on Friday morning, at the same time as the last episode of “WandaVision” premiered, according to Downdetector, a site that tracks reports of Internet service outages. (There were also numerous complaints through social media from frustrated Disney + subscribers.) Disney + was back in operation in about 10 minutes. Disney did not comment on the disruption.
“WandaVision” is Disney’s first crack in a TV series based on its Marvel franchise. Unlike Netflix, which broadcasts all episodes of a given TV season at once, Disney + episodes premiere weekly, usually at 3 a.m. ET at midnight every Friday.
This release program encourages rabid fans to stay up late or wake up before every episode gets spoiled on social media. And when most of the world wakes up on Friday morning, everything that happened in the last episode is already dominating the online conversation.
In short, Disney’s release schedule expands the power of a show’s permanence over several weeks, rather than at the same time, as when fans go through “Bridgerton” or whatever the Netflix series of moment.
And Disney’s launch program for the Marvel and Star Wars shows at Disney + will ensure that the same hype is repeated virtually every week for the rest of 2021. Disney’s upcoming Disney show, “The Falcon Captain and the Soldier of ‘Winter’ will be released a couple of weeks after the current “WandaVision” season ends. After that, the new Marvel show “Loki” will be released. The pattern is expected to continue until the end of the year, when the next round of Star Wars shows is scheduled to begin.
The launch strategy has paid off at Disney, which is still in the early days of creating an original content library for Disney +. Disney said last week that Disney + had 94.9 million subscribers in early January. The company expects to have up to 260 million Disney + subscribers by 2024.
Disney still has a long way to go to build its new content library. (Netflix had several years to do so before the release of Disney +). The vast majority of the Disney + library consists of old programs and movies, which do not have the same viscosity as new things to see.
But for now, Disney can keep customers stuck in the service week after week with attractive deals from its two most popular franchises, Marvel and Star Wars.