It’s Not All Connected: Marvel Exec Clarifies the Studio’s Recent Rebranding

Marvel Studios is now–at least in part–reborn. As the studio forges ahead through its uneven Multiverse Saga, fans will find themselves on more of a choose your own adventure journey that Marvel hopes will help keep attracting new viewers. Following Echo, X-Men ’97 became the first production to debut under the new Marvel Animation banner. This Fall, Agatha All Along will mark the debut of the resurrected Marvel Television banner. The hope, according to Marvel’s head of streaming, television and animation, Brad Winderbaum, “is to “signal to the general audience that we’re creating a lot of options, and you can follow your tastes within this brand.”

There was a lot of pressure post-‘Avengers: Endgame’ on the public to feel obligated to watch absolutely everything in order to watch anything. Part of the rebranding was a signal to the general audience that we’re creating a lot of options, and you can follow your tastes within this brand. Some will be more comedic, some will be more dramatic, some will be animated, some will be live-action. Marvel is more than just one thing — it is actually many different genres that just happened to coexist in a single narrative.

-Brad Winderbaum

Even as the Mutliverse Saga moves ahead, the rebranding does not create different universes within the MCU. That would be messier and increase confusion. Instead, as Winderbaum points out, “the characters still live and breathe in the same universe, but the interconnectivity is not so rigid that you need to watch Project A to understand Project B.” In that sense, the experience, says Winderbaum, should become more akin to that enjoyed by comic book readers who can pick up a Captain America comic without worrying about what’s going on in the most recent run of The Avengers. “The hope is that, like the comics, you can just pop in anywhere and have a satisfying experience. We’re trying to dispel the idea that you need to do any kind of setup work to watch anything else.”

Iger’s return to Disney also came with a mandate that some of the larger studios–Marvel included–pull back a bit on the quantity of their streaming output. According to Winderbaum, that’s something that Marvel Studios had already begun working on. So, in addition to the reduced pressure to watch everything because “it’s all connected”, there’s also a reduction in content which should add up to an increase in quality and, hopefully, a better experience for the audience. “We were already, as of two years ago, adapting our process from being, you know, fill the service as fast as possible no matter what, to a more considered approach,” said Winderbaum. “I really like the idea of two shows a year, especially because we are developing more than we make. We used to treat the shows like the features where we’re gonna make a show and that’s it, we’re going to hit a release date, hell or high water. Well, it’s hard to do for a two hour feature, it’s even harder to do for, six, seven, eight, nine hours. So now we have a more traditional approach.” And so while the studio may have a lot of projects in the pipeline–like the LONG-GESTATING Nova series–there’s no guarantee that they’ll hit D+ soon, if ever; only that if and when they do, they’ll have been carefully curated.

Ultimately, the rebranding changes absolutely nothing for your average MCU superfan. The banner that hits the screen for a few seconds won’t stop the completist from watching everything and criticizing the VFX; however, the strategy behind the rebranding isn’t aimed at those fans but rather at drawing new viewers in without overwhelming them. For a studio that hopes they have a whole lot more stories to tell, that’s the only way to stay in the game for the long haul.

Source: Variety