Marvel Has Failed Again On Disney+
Werewolf by Night did not appear on the Nielsen ratings when it was released on Disney+.
Things have been slow going on the Marvel front when it comes to content being released on Disney+. The most recent bomb was Werewolf by Night, which failed to appear in the Nielsen ratings when it had been released on October 7th. The Halloween special did not garner enough watches to even appear on the “Originals” list at all, meaning that another Marvel property has seemingly failed on the streaming platform.
The issue for a lot of Marvel fans is that most people are now suffering from superhero fatigue, as the MCU is continually pumping out material for the world to watch via movies in theaters or on Disney+. At some point, audiences are not going to be able to catch up to everything being released, or they will simply lose interest based on how much content is readily available to be watched. Werewolf by Night was a special that sort of flew under the radar, and it wasn’t marketed that well, at least to us.
Werewolf by Night is also a story that may not be well known to those who are not avid comic book readers, as Marvel certainly tried something that was more for the “hardcore” fans of comic properties by releasing the special on Disney+. There are a ton of people that simply watch the movies and shows but have never taken an interest in the comics that serve as inspiration. It could be that people were not familiar enough with the Were by Night story to want to give it a fair chance.
Gael García Bernal stars in Werewolf by Night as Jack Russell/Werewolf by Night, and the movie follows a group of monster hunters vying for a relic known as the “bloodstone.” They do so while being hunted by a beast who is also implanted with one and happens to be Russell’s friend who he had intended on rescuing from captivity. Though the special was not a hit for Disney+, it was still quite entertaining, and something that Marvel should invest more time in trying to market.
Disney is giving Marvel the ability to experiment with different properties, which is also a good thing. The superhero fatigue might be because everyone has seen the same characters for years now and are wanting to see something a bit more fresh and new. Werewolf by Night may have not been a “hit” but it was still fantastically produced. We would hope that there are going to be more “off the wall” types of Marvel stories like this told in the future.
Although Werewolf by Night wasn’t a hit on Disney+, according to the Nielsen ratings, fans might have watched it a lot more during the week of Halloween. The ratings pulled up for the week when the werewolf special was released only accounts for a few days, meaning that it might have gathered much more attention in the following weeks. Again, we hope that Disney is not going to let the ratings of an experimental special keep it from trying different stories in the future.
