Nobody is Watching Star Wars or Marvel
Disney’s final quarter of 2023 isn’t shaping up to be the lifeline they desperately need. Samba TV has published their ratings for the Ahsoka season finale, and they’re not good. According to the streaming data analysts, “The Jedi, the Witch, and the Warlord” (ugh) pulled in 836,000 households over its first six days. That’s a drop of almost 400,000 viewers since its premiere, which garnered 1.2 million households; in other words, between the premiere and the finale, Ahsoka lost nearly a third of its viewers. Samba also says that the largest group tuning in to the Ahsoka finale were “older millennials,” which makes sense; these are probably Clone Wars and Rebels fans who understood the show better than anyone else could or prequel fans who wanted to see Hayden Christensen again.
The finale of #Ahsoka landed on #DisneyPlus last week to 863k US households watching. Older millennials tuned in at the highest rate to watch whether #Thrawn made it off Peridea.#SambaTVInsights #AhsokaTano #StarWars pic.twitter.com/XMkDddKoKL
— Samba TV (@samba_tv) October 11, 2023
On the Marvel front, The Marvels, the upcoming Captain Marvel (and Ms. Marvel and WandaVision) sequel, is not tracking well at all. Pre-sale tickets have sold less than a third of what those for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 did. To put that into perspective, Guardians 3 made $118.4 million in its opening weekend; a third of that is around $39 million, although, for some reason, projections are a bit higher at $50-75 million. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was eventually successful, albeit mildly so, with good word of mouth allowing it to avoid the usual drops in box office over subsequent weekends. Granted, I haven’t seen the movie, but I don’t see that happening for The Marvels.
Remember when Disney bought Marvel and Star Wars, and everyone thought they’d be raking in cash for decades to come? It’s amazing what gross mismanagement will do to a sure thing. And that’s the rub; it didn’t have to be this way. There’s no reason these two IPs can’t continue to be the crown jewels in Disney’s entertainment vault. But after years of lousy movies and lousier TV shows, a relentless barrage of identity politics, an embarrassing downgrade in special effects, the desecration of classic characters people love, an inability to make them love new characters, bad scripts, boring stories, and hostility towards their fans, Disney has killed their golden geese, then thrown whatever remaining eggs they had at a brick wall. People gave Ahsoka a chance – not as many people as were watching The Mandalorian at the height of its popularity, but still – and they were rewarded with flat acting, personality-devoid characters, a slower-than-snails pace, and a half-assed story that made the big villain look like an idiot. And as for Marvel, it looks like people are done taking a chance on whatever new endurance trial they try to pass off as entertainment. Previous films, like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, relied so heavily on the Disney+ shows nobody is watching that the majority of the audience doesn’t want to be confused by one that wears its streaming influence on its sleeve. I don’t know how either of these franchises crawls its way out of the pit Disney’s thrown them into, but it’s not going to be easy. (A great video on the Nerdrotic channel offers a few suggestions.)
