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 appeared to take down the company’s streaming service on Friday.
Disney + experienced a brief outage on Friday morning, around the same time that the latest episode of “WandaVision” premiered, according to Downdetector, a site that tracks reports of Internet service outages. (There were also numerous social media complaints from frustrated Disney + subscribers.) Disney + was back up and running within an hour.
A Disney spokesperson was not immediately available to comment on the outage.
“WandaVision” is Disney’s first crack in a TV series based on his Marvel franchise. Unlike Netflix, which releases all episodes of a particular TV season at once, Disney + episodes premiere weekly, usually every Friday at 3 p.m. ET / midnight PT.
That release schedule urges rabid fans to stay up late or wake up early before each episode gets spoiled on social media. And by the time most of the world wakes up Friday morning, what happened in the last episode is already dominating the online conversation.
In short, Disney’s release schedule extends the staying power of a show over the course of several weeks, rather than all at once, like when fans blow through “Bridgerton” or whatever the hit Netflix series of the moment.
And Disney’s release schedule for Marvel and Star Wars shows on Disney + will keep the same hype repeating practically every week for the remainder of 2021. Disney’s next Marvel show, “Captain Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” comes after a few weeks. the current premiere. season of “WandaVision” ends. After that, the new Marvel show “Loki” will premiere. The pattern is expected to continue through the end of the year when the next round of Star Wars shows is scheduled.
The release strategy has 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 it will have up to 260 million Disney + subscribers by 2024.
Disney still has a long way to go to build its library of new content. (Netflix had several years to do that before Disney + launched.) The vast majority of the Disney + library is made up of old shows and movies, which aren’t as tacky as new stuff to watch.
But for now, Disney customers can stick with the service week after week with tantalizing offers from the two most popular franchises, Marvel and Star Wars.