Posted in: Disney+, Marvel, TV | Tagged: disney plus, doctor strange, marvel, opinion, WandaVision

The Madness Of Having To Watch WandaVision To Get Doctor Strange 2

No spoilers, I promise. I've just got back from seeing Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness on general release in the UK. I saw it in 3D, in a medium-full house on the IMAX screen at the local Kingston-Upon-Thames Odeon cinema for its first screening. And I got to hear what people said on the way out. Now I come from a Marvel-watching household. We watched Agents Of SHIELD and Agent Carter as a family, we see the movies (albeit not always on release), and we have especially dived into the series on Disney+ – and WandaVision was our favourite. Watching Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness was a real continuance of that. But coming out of the cinema, other groups I listened in on had questions, questions that – because none of that group had seen WandaVision – could answer. They'd seen all the movies, followed Wanda Maximoff's story from Captain America through the Avengers – and had no idea what had happened since. What was that about her husband? What was that about her kids? Why was she even called Scarlet Witch now – was that a thing?

We've become used to movies being franchises, but movies and TV shows together? Previous Marvel TV shows played off what we had seen on the movie screen, whether that was Agents of SHIELD in Greenwich, or the Black Widow's sister popping up all over the place. But this is the first time that, when seeing the movie, the plot didn't make sense unless you had seen the TV show. Even stuff like Loki and What If, while providing a wider context to the multiverse, weren't necessary as WandaVision which contains plot points and emotional beats that this movie depends on.

Will this drive a new audience to subscribe to Disney+? Or will it just turn them off entirely, if this is the way of things going forward? It's not even just not having Disney+, but there are whole areas of the world that don't get Disney+, but who will see this movie. They just might not "get" it.

A number of TV series have continued into movie form of course, but generally, they have been created so that they stand alone, Serenity being a prime example. You should be able to watch that film without having even heard of Firefly, and the odds are most of the cinema audience were in that position.

Maybe they should have edited down a three-hour cut of WandaVision and put that in the cinemas last month? Just to give some people a chance?

Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness is on general release in the UK and the US. WandaVision is available streaming on Disney+.

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