Why the “Loki” Release-Date Change Is So Hugely Important
Wednesdays might now forever be associated with Marvel, and Fridays with "Star Wars."
Last week, on Wednesday, May 5, Disney made a surprise announcement: it wasn’t only changing the release date for its newest Disney+ series to take place within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Loki, it was also changing its release day, moving it from the customary Fridays to Wednesdays.
This initially came as a surprise to many – after all, Disney’s overriding goal since way back on November 12, 2019, when its new streaming service first came online, was to dominate Fridays, making that the day that viewers had to tune into the platform for the latest Star Wars and (eventually) Marvel installments. In retrospect, however, the move was an inevitable one, showing just how massive the Mouse House’s content roster is once all of its constituent studios can get their full production slates up and running – and showing just how far the company’s reach can be in shaping audiences’ viewing habits the whole globe over.
The dark days of Disney+’s first year
While dominating (at least) every single Friday of the year was always the plan, it ended up taking far longer to get there than The Walt Disney Company had expected.
When Disney+ first launched in November ‘19, the only production that was available to air from Disney’s twin crown jewels of Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm was The Mandalorian, the first-ever live-action television series set within that Star Wars galaxy far, far away. Fortunately for the company, the show proved to be more than up to the challenge of being the sole “killer app” for those first few months, striking international lightning and finding purchase within the larger popular culture (and, most importantly of all, as far as Disney was concerned, driving early subscription numbers). Every Friday from then until the end of the year – with one key exception, when Mandalorian moved over to Wednesday to make way for the franchise’s latest theatrical release, Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker – was more or less owned by the newest streamer.
With Marvel Cinematic Universe releases finally expected to arrive sometime in the summer, solidifying Disney+’s first full year and beginning its second with a thunderous bang, Disney essentially needed to just tread water for the first half of 2020. Star Wars again was leaned upon to serve this function: Lucasfilm turned to the cut final season of The Clone Wars (2008-2014), the property’s very first TV outing, and one that was, ironically, initially cancelled in order to make way for all of the new Disney-supervised projects. And again with one key exception, all of the episodes of Clone Wars’s seventh season would land on Fridays, ranging from late February to early May, capably getting the Disney+ job done.
(Though many at the time may have viewed this programming choice as something of a move of desperation, just Disney looking to grab whatever content it had more-or-less readily available in order to keep the new platform floating along, it was actually a shrewd calculation intended to set up the future years of Disney+-exclusive storytelling – the characters and plot points that are [re]introduced in Clone Wars’s final chapters would go on to power The Mandalorian’s second season that fall, along with a whole slew of spinoff series, starting with The Bad Batch this month and continuing on well into 2022 with the likes of Ahsoka).
In this way, 18 weeks’ worth of programming was stretched to cover a period of six months – less than ideal, but adequate to the task. However, before the Marvel reinforcements could be deployed on the streaming battlefield, the covid-19 pandemic struck, instantly halting all film and television productions (and many individuals’ personal lives, of course) all around the world – and throwing the Mouse House’s grand plans of weekend superiority out the window. Now, with a dearth of exclusive content suddenly yawning in front of it for an unknown amount of time, Disney desperately needed a whole new stopgap to fill at least a fraction of this void.
Enter Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian, a documentary miniseries that took viewers behind the scenes of Disney+’s inaugural Star Wars outing, covering its cast, directors, special and visual effects, and its references to and connections with the greater saga. Placing what had traditionally been the bonus features of home-video releases into a position of prominence on the still-fledgling platform most likely wasn’t what Disney executives originally had in mind when brainstorming their would-be Netflix conqueror, but it would nonetheless be enough to cover all of the month of May and most of June. (To be fair to Disney+’s schedulers and overseers, it’s entirely possible that Disney Gallery was always on the docket; however, it’s undeniable that it was thrust from its supplemental status to the spotlight, becoming the only combatant to march onto the field under either a Lucasfilm or Marvel Studios banner. Furthermore, whether the series was a last-minute addition or not, it obviously was successful – so much so, in fact, that Disney and Marvel ended up duplicating the premise the following year in the form of Assembled, a collection of behind-the-scenes looks at the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe releases.)
With the pandemic continuing to spiral out of control for the remainder of 2020, most especially in the United States of America, and with all future productions indefinitely put on hold, it quickly became clear that the sole remaining piece of exclusive armament left in Disney+’s arsenal was The Mandalorian’s second season, which wouldn’t be able to arrive until the fall. From June 19 until October 30, then, there was nothing.
Turning the ship around in Disney+’s second year – and beyond
Covid may not have been tamed before the end of 2020, but Hollywood had succeeded in learning how to contend with it, getting its production pipeline slowly back up and running again. For the Mouse, this meant that the new Mandalorian episodes were more than just a lifeline – they would be, at long last, the culmination of the company’s streaming ambitions.
To wit: when combined with another, one-off installment of Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian, meant to cover all of that show’s newest chapters in one fell swoop, Disney+ had every Friday filled from the end of October 2020 to January 1, 2021. Then, after just a quick two-week hiatus, that end-of-week coverage began a new, unbroken streak that looks to extend until at least August, incorporating WandaVision (finally, the first piece of Marvel Studios-powered television), The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, their respective Assembled specials, and, currently, Star Wars: The Bad Batch. And the remainder of the year appears equally strong, with an additional six series, whether mini- or ongoing, waiting in the wings – that breaks down to four Marvel Cinematic Universe outings (Loki, What If…?, Ms. Marvel, and Hawkeye) and two Star Wars ones (Visions and The Book of Boba Fett).
All of which means the company is, for the first time since November ’19, not only in a position of authority, but also one of abundance – there are approximately 63 episodes left to deliver and only 34 weeks to do so in. (Yes, yes – we may assume that not every Disney+ show will conclude in ’21, but shaving off just a few of these numbers still leaves a preponderance of material to broadcast.) The only solution to this “problem” of proliferation is to move to multiple releases per week, and rather than divide viewers’ attention between two (or, potentially, more) products on the same day, Disney has opted to add on a whole new delivery day – hence Loki becoming the first project to land on Wednesdays.
(We should stop for a moment to note that there is at least one major exception to this new one-release-per-day rule: Black Widow, the first new MCU film in two years, will arrive both in theaters and on Disney+ on Friday, July 9 – and there is also the possibility that its own Assembled chapter will drop on the subsequent Friday, July 16. The titular Bad Batch of clone troopers will just have to make do with sharing the limelight on those two occasions – and Disney will have to carefully study what effect, if any, it has on the streaming numbers.)
It is currently unknown how long this twice-a-week schedule will last; the company has, understandably – given all the unprecedented pandemic-related delays – taken to only announcing the airdates of its next wave of series at essentially the very last minute. However, there is a good possibility that the Mouse House will want to keep its brands to its newly allotted days, thereby emblazoning in audiences’ minds that Wednesdays will forever more belong to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Fridays to Star Wars, even if, say, a particular week will only see the next installment of What If…? materialize. How Disney settles on this question will be one of the most telling decisions it can make as a global media giant, not just as a streaming competitor looking to maintain its hard-fought perch of can’t-miss TV.