Demand For Marvel & Star Wars Disney+ Originals Declining (2024)

One of the biggest selling points of subscribing to Disney+ has been its selection of original shows, with the streaming platform delivering lots of Marvel and Star Wars series each year.

It all started with “The Mandalorian”, which was the show that kicked off the launch of Disney+ and it was followed by many more Star Wars series including “Obi-Wan Kenobi”, “Ahsoka”, “The Acolyte”, “The Book Of Boba Fett” and “Andor”. Later this year, “Skeleton Crew” will be added to the line up.

Marvel Studios kicked off its Disney+ adventures with “WandaVision” in 2021, followed by “The Falcon And The Winter Solder”, “Loki”, “Hawkeye”, “Secret Invasion”, “Ms Marvel”, “Moon Knight”, “She-Hulk: Attorney At Law”, and “Echo”.

This is in addition to animated shows like “Star Wars: The Bad Batch” and Marvel’s “What If?”, plus other specials like “Werewolf By Night”.

With Disney+ becoming an overnight success upon launch and the pandemic causing streaming to boom, Disney executives pushed forward with plans to churn out more and more of these iconic franchises to hungry consumers who just wanted more things to watch.

However, all of these shows have had the exact opposite effect, instead of increasing viewership, viewership has been declining. Not just on Disney+ but also at the box office, with “The Marvels” and “Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania” failing to ignite the box office, marking the biggest failure of Marvel Studios.

The push to create more content for Disney+ resulted in too many projects being released, causing multiple problems, such as a reduction in quality and characters being highlighted that audiences just didn’t care about. Not only was the quality reduced, but with many other studios also churning out more and more superhero shows, superhero fatigue caused audiences to start being a little more picky with what they watched.

Some new data from Parrot Analyics for the Wrap, have shown that demand for these shows has drastically slow.

Disney has already begun to change course to correct this problem. With the return of Bob Iger as the CEO in late 2022, he went on a major cost cutting exercise, looking to save billions of dollars, which saw thousands of people being let go from the company.

Both Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm hit the pause button on their productions, drastically slowing the pace down and letting audiences breathe while giving them time to try to improve the shows in development. We’ve also seen both studios refocusing back on theatrical releases, but we won’t likely see the impact of some of these changes for years.

The Hollywood strikes were a perfect excuse for Disney to pull back production and delay the release of many titles. Their entire slate was delayed by over a year, with some of the titles, like “Ironheart”, which was originally announced to be released in 2022, won’t hit Disney+ until 2025, even though filming wrapped years ago.

The data from Parrot highlights how demand for the latest Star Wars series is much lower than a couple of years ago and with the negative backlash from the release of “The Acolyte”, which not only was met with online ridicule, but the viewership data from Nielsen has shown that hardly anyone has watched the series.

Marvel’s decline in demand isn’t as bad as it has been for Star Wars, in which audiences have lost interest. The success of “Deadpool & Wolverine” in cinemas this past month has shown that the studios can return to the top. Proving that focusing on quality and characters people care about is the best way to drive engagement.

The data does show how much more demand there was for the first season of “The Mandalorian”, which shouldn’t be a huge surprise, since it was the first-ever Star Wars TV show, but what’s more worrying, is that the number of people who had Disney+ during the early months post-launch was much lower than when other Star Wars shows were released.

There is little doubt that Disney+ can’t just rely on Marvel and Star Wars to pull in audiences, but rather than look to other franchises or build new ones, it’s turned its attention to its popular general entertainment studio engines, which provide Hulu with hit shows that audiences love. This has already been proven to work internationally, and the introduction of Hulu On Disney+ in the US shows the direction Disney+ is going in, and it’s no doubt going to merge the two platforms together eventually, (but due to legal issues with Comcast, they still can’t do that just yet).

Spending millions of dollars on new expensive shows from Marvel and Star Wars does work, but only in small doses, it needs more variety to pull in audiences. Sadly, we are in the awkward stage where they’ve noticed this, but didn’t have anything planned to fill the void. Plus, with a general reduction in overall spending on Disney+ Originals to bring the platform to profitability, we’re certainly in a drought for major titles on Disney+ right now.

Do you think demand for Marvel and Star Wars Disney+ shows has declined? Let me know on social media!