Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany star as Wanda Maximoff and Vision in Marvel’s “WandaVision”.
Disney
Disney’s “WandaVision” is so powerful and popular that it seemed to take down the company’s streaming service on Friday.
Disney + suffered a brief outage on Friday morning, around the same time that the last episode of “WandaVision” debuted, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks reports of Internet service outages. (There were also numerous complaints on social networks from frustrated Disney + subscribers.) Disney + was operational again in about 10 minutes. Disney did not comment on the interruption.
“WandaVision” is Disney’s first attempt at a TV series based on its Marvel franchise. Unlike Netflix, which releases all episodes of a given TV season at once, Disney + episodes open weekly, usually at 3am ET / midnight PT every Friday.
This release schedule encourages angry fans to stay up late or get up early before each episode is released on social media. And when most of the world wakes up on Friday morning, whatever happened in the last episode is already dominating online conversation.
In short, Disney’s release schedule extends the staying power of a show over several weeks, instead of all at once, such as when fans have fun with “Bridgerton” or whatever the hot Netflix series from the moment.
And Disney’s release schedule 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. Marvel’s next Disney program, “Captain Falcon and the Soldier of Winter “, will premiere a few weeks after the current” WandaVision “season ends. After that, Marvel’s new show “Loki” will debut. The pattern is expected to continue until the end of the year, when the next round of Star Wars programs is scheduled to begin.
The launch strategy paid off for Disney, which is still in the early days of building a library of original content for Disney +. Disney said last week that Disney + had 94.9 million subscribers in early January. The company predicts that it will have up to 260 million Disney + subscribers in 2024.
Disney still has a long way to go to build its library of new content. (Netflix had several years to do this before the launch of Disney +.) The vast majority of the Disney + library consists of old shows and movies, which don’t have the same grip on new things to watch.
But for now, Disney can keep customers hooked on the service week after week with attractive offers from its two most popular franchises, Marvel and Star Wars.