Marvel Is Rebranding Its Television and animation Shows to help with audience confusion

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The rebrands are meant to help Marvel disabuse audiences from the pervasive impression that its content is one unified narrative experience that must be consumed in its totality.

“There was a lot of pressure post-‘Avengers: Endgame’ on the public to feel obligated to watch absolutely everything in order to watch anything,” says Brad Winderbaum, Marvel’s head of streaming, television and animation. “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.”

When Marvel Studios first launched into streaming, Feige made a point to note that the shows were part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and their storylines would be integrated with the feature films. The events of 2021’s “WandaVision” carried over into 2022’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and 2023’s “The Marvels,” for example, while the first season of “Loki” in 2021 fed into “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” in 2023, which in turn led into the events of “Loki” Season 2 later that year.

Moving forward, however, Marvel intends to de-emphasize those connections, as some audiences have come to see the 46 titles that currently make up the MCU as a barrier of entry.

“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,” Winderbaum says. “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.”

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