Marvel Studios has faced more than its fair share of challenges since Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home were released. A global pandemic, a shift into streaming, and a push from Disney to produce more content than ever before have all led to a noticeable dip in quality and box office takings.
The plan now is to right the ship, hence why we've seen multiple movies and TV shows delayed and others - like Captain America: Brave New World and Daredevil: Born Again - taken back to the drawing board.
Talking to ComicBook.com about the upcoming release of Echo, Marvel Studios Head of Streaming, Television, and Animation Brad Winderbaum addressed how the MCU is learning from its recent missteps and what will change moving forward.
"We've learned a lot," he admitted. "We produced a lot of content very quickly, and we're primarily a filmmaking company. So, you can see that our first round of shows have a very movie-like structure: they arc-out the characters by the end; they feel like a standalone limited series."
Moving forward, our content is going to feel a lot more like television," Winderbaum added. "It kind of drives toward the horizon; drives towards the future, and keeps people engaged for longer periods of time, in the more leaned-back setting of your living room. To set it apart, frankly, from the big, cinematic event experiences in the movie theater."
This sounds like the best possible approach and is why Marvel Studios now plans to produce TV shows in a more traditional manner with series bibles and showrunners.
Up until recently, they've been shot like movies with reshoots later used to fix what wasn't working. That's neither cost-effective nor something which works for episodic storytelling, hence why more than a few MCU TV shows have underwhelmed fans (Secret Invasion is the most recent example).
It's probably going to take Kevin Feige a while to get this franchise back on the right track; 2024 will see the release of only Deadpool 3 in theaters and Echo and Agatha All Along on Disney+.
Disney CEO Bob Iger also appears to be taking a hands-on approach to fixing Marvel Studios' output. Last year, he criticised Bob Chapek's handling of Disney's franchises when he said, "I think we’ve conditioned the audience to expect that these films will be on streaming platforms relatively quickly and that the experience of accessing them and watching them in the home is better than it ever was."
It's a valid point. After all, why go and watch The Marvels in theaters when the MCU's movies so quickly arrive on streaming and Ms. Marvel is right there to watch for free?