Disney May Be About To Overexpose Star Wars And Marvel
By: Damon Ferrara
Tags: Disney, Star Wars, Film Industry, Marvel, Disney Plus

Disney+ just announced dozens of new projects

The Mandalorian. Image credit: Disney

Disney just showcased nine new Star Wars TV shows and twelve new Marvel ones. That’s on top of Marvel’s usual movies and some upcoming new Star Wars flicks. The studio wants to build up Disney+, but with the potential for overexposure and diminished quality control, this is not the way.

You can find the full list of shows here. The actual content varies in promise. I will happily watch Ahsoka and the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special. On the other hand, there’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, which brings back Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan and Hayden Christensen as Darth Vader. Disney swapping original trilogy nostalgia for prequel trilogy nostalgia is vindicating for us young people, but it’s still empty nostalgia.

The real problem, however, is the quantity. There’s too much of it. The release schedule is unclear, so some of these might be years away. Kenobi is a miniseries and others might be, as well. But that’s still exponentially more time than either franchise has demanded from its fans before.

This has consequences. Firstly, it reduces the uniqueness of every installment. Love them or hate them, the prequels, The Force Awakens, and The Avengers were events, widely anticipated, watched, and discussed. They were shared, by all of us. Even now, part of what makes The Mandalorian special is that it’s being enjoyed by everyone together. When Star Wars and Marvel drop installments thrice weekly forever, that monocultural experience will end.

Secondly, it turns their shared universes from something joyful into a chore. A Clone Wars character on The Mandalorian? That’s a fun connection between two shows. But when five shows are airing together, only the hardest of hardcore fans will want to watch them all. Some other fans will drudge through everything for completion’s sake. But with no end in sight, the rest of us probably won’t bother. We’ll have to accept increasing references to shows we’ve never seen — or tune out entirely.

Thirdly, those shared universes will also become nightmares for the creatives. Disney threw out most of Star Wars’ preexisting continuity when it bought Lucasfilm, and Marvel’s never pretended its films exist alongside its comics. Those blank slates mean writers and directors have room to tell the stories they want to tell. Filling it in so quickly will pin those creatives down, while making them each keep track of nine other shows to make sure they’re not breaking the timeline.

Fourthly, it makes quality control harder. It’s tougher to say you only accept the best pitches when you accept them by the dozen. And it’s harder for a single creative voice to keep track of all these projects, let alone oversee them. Can Kevin Feige maintain Marvel’s tone across, say, thirty hours of content a year instead of six? Is anyone keeping track of Star Wars’ bigger picture? Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau have done a wonderful job on The Mandalorian, but Filoni now has four shows and Favreau three. When your workload quadruples, do you keep up the same quality?

Oversaturation’s doomed plenty of franchises. There might be some schadenfreude to Disney meeting the same fate, but for those of us who like Marvel and Star Wars, it’s also a sad possibility. It would take some real inspiration to pull all this off. I sincerely wish the best of luck to the studio that made The Rise of Skywalker.