The premiere of Loki season 2 was last night on Disney Plus, the service mercifully airing episodes at night in my time zone now rather than in the early morning hours so I’d have to wake up and watch before Twitter spoiled it.
It was pretty good, as we learn that (spoilers) Loki is not stuck in a new dimension, he’s actually warping back and forth in time in the TVA itself, and the episode is about attempting to extract him from that as the TVA crumbles around him with all the multiverse timelines expanding.
But what remains thoroughly bizarre, and a core problem with Disney Plus’s content strategy, is that Loki is so far the only Marvel show to get a second season. Here’s the state of every MCU show on Disney Plus and why this is so weird:
- Loki – Season 2 is airing.
- WandaVision – Led into Multiverse of Madness, will spawn a separate show, VisionQuest, unclear when Wanda will be seen again.
- The Falcon and the Winter Soldier – Was a story mainly about Sam getting his new suit, leads directly into Captain America 4.
- Hawkeye – Just…vanished off the face of the earth after season 1, no clue if and when Kate Bishop will return.
- Moon Knight – Allegedly does have a season 2, though for whatever reason this has never been officially confirmed by Marvel and may not actually happen.
- Ms. Marvel – Led into The Marvels, though there could be a season 2 potentially after that.
- She-Hulk – Despite being the most structured like a normal TV show, absolutely no word on a renewal for season 2.
- Secret Invasion – Appeared to have always been intended to be a one=off, lord knows it shouldn’t return.
What If…?, the animated series, is the only show getting a confirmed second season besides Loki. This is, of course, not how things used to be. Once upon a time Marvel TV shows, even when fully ignored by the MCU, were still actual TV shows that aired and were renewed like TV shows. Such as:
- Agents of SHIELD – 7 seasons
- Agent Carter – 2 seasons
- Daredevil – 3 seasons
- Jessica Jones – 3 seasons
- Luke Cage – 2 seasons
- Iron Fist – 2 seasons
- The Punisher – 2 seasons
Not only were these multiple seasons each, the network-based Agents of SHIELD seasons were almost all 22 episodes. The final two seasons were 13 episodes, and nearly all the seasons of the Netflix shows were 10-13 episodes. Now? The MCU shows are 6-9 episodes, with shorter episodes in general, usually ranging from 30-45 minutes.
Disney Plus is trying to make TV shows without actually letting them be TV shows. The majority of shows on this list felt like over-long movies broken up in six parts or so. Only a select few actually felt like TV shows, and I’d include WandaVision, Loki and She-Hulk in that list. Really none of the others.
Disney is said to be scaling back on big-budget Marvel shows, so perhaps this is only going to get worse, not better. We have other shows like Ironheart and Echo still to come, but they seem likely to run into the same problems. We’ll have to see.
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