In 2021, Marvel Studios began a full-scale assault on our TV screens with numerous live-action MCU shows coming on the then-newDisney+ platform. Here now, just three years later there have been 10 shows - two with multiple seasons even! - that have created more hours of MCU content than all the MCU movies combined, along with four new superhero franchises in Moon Knight, She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel, and Hawkeye (Sorry, Jeremy Renner!).

To put it into context, all four of those shows debuted in the span of one year - a feat that has taken Marvel Studios' movies three times the amount of time to do.

Two years after the debut of all four of those new MCU franchise shows, however, we're looking around like John Travolta in that Pulp Fiction meme for a new season. As it turns out, we may be looking in the wrong place - because the future's of Disney+'s MCU heroes Moon Knight, She-Hulk, Hawkeye, and Ms. Marvel aren't in new seasons of their shows but rather in movies. And one particular movie, in that.

As we delve into the Disney+ era of new MCU heroes, it's important to understand why they debuted there - and not in Marvel movies as their predecessors have done - and what is steering them back towards movies, and away from new seasons.

Why did new MCU heroes begin debuting on Disney+ shows and not movies?

Disney+ was launched in 2019 to cement Disney's, and all its subsidiaries, place in the future people see (and saw even back then) about streaming's place in our future. To help bolster the service at launch, Disney corralled its four major studios - Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Walt Disney Animation Studios - to make TV shows exclusively for that platform. This was seen as then-departing Disney CEO Bob Iger's last big bet on the future, as he retired in early 2020.

Over the next four years, Marvel Studios' debuted numerous new heroes on Disney+ - some with thier own shows, and others as part of legacy shows. Those include Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), Hawkeye (Hailee Stanfield), Echo (Alaqua Cox), Moon Knight (Oscar Isaac), Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani), and She-Hulk (Tatiana Maslany).

While new heroes still debuted in MCU movies - they were almost always supporting other established stars in sequels - except for 2021's The Eternals and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, both of which were greenlit a year before Disney+ launched. Come 2019, major new MCU heroes were entirely set to debut with their own small-screen show - not a big budget motion picture. For 2022 through 2024, all of Marvel Studios' movies have been (and will be) sequels.

To help bolster the launch of its parent company Disney's streaming service, Marvel Studios stopped bringing what Iger later described as "the newness" to movie theaters, and made it almost exclusively for Disney+ TV shows.

Disney+ shows maked Marvel Studios heroes feel small (and they felt it too)

Like a meta version of Quantumania, seeing new MCU heroes debut in thier own projects on Disney+ was amazing in scale. The gloriousness of WandaVision and Loki on a weekly basis boasting MCU movie-level budgets was something. But as time went on, seeing MCU movie-level casting and effects on a weekly basis began to make the MCU movies feel like extended TV episodes as a result.

Secret Invasion, which was originally planned as a movie, was a MCU spy show with an amazing cast that felt stretched thin across roughly six hours of episodic TV. At the same time, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania felt very rough compared to our memory of the MCU's past greatness... as well as the heights of what we could get in MCU TV of the period.

Additionally, when Marvel Studios had great Disney+ shows, people wanted more. (Understandably.) But whereas the conventional TV wisdom is a second season, even back in 2021, Marvel was hesistant for second seasons, with a preferred course leading back to the movie theater business it knew so well.

2021's Loki has been the sole live-action MCU show to get a second season so far. WandaVision's Wanda Maximoff returned to movies in the third Doctor Strange, while Monica Rambeau and Ms. Marvel both joined the Captain Marvel sequel instead of a second season of Ms. Marvel (or a Monica series of her own, after WandaVision). While rumors of a second season of Hawkeye were floated around, series co-star Jeremy Renner put those to rest recently saying he hasn't heard anything about it.

As for those other MCU heroes who debuted at Disney+ - Moon Knight (Oscar Isaac) and She-Hulk (Tatiana Maslany) - even at the conclusion of their own first seasons, the talk was more about them going to movies instead of a second season.

Why are Disney+'s spotlighted MCU heroes destined for movies and not second seasons?

Television is a quick business - much quicker than movies even. In just four years, Marvel Studios has doubled the amount of MCU hours it's created just by benefit of the Disney+ shows. The downside of that speed, unfortunately, is the fact that in that quickness, there's also the fact that plans can change equally quickly.

We all saw how Marvel Studios' did a massive course correction on Daredevil: Born Again, but others might remember how a previously announced MCU TV show for Disney+ - Armor Wars - was quietly repositioned as a movie.

Another thing to consider is cost. While TV is seen as cheaper than movies, Marvel Studios' weren't. WandaVision had a reported budget of $25 million per episode - that's $225 million for all nine episodes, or $25 million more than the movie Spider-Man: No Way Home (the latter, which earned $1 billion at the box office before it ever came to streaming). Loki season 2 cost a reported $141 million, and Moon Knight's first season cost a reported $147 million.

To put that in perspective, would Disney rather have a Moon Knight second season or a Moon Knight movie, with the latter able to earn its budget back in theaters even before becoming a draw for Disney+? I think I know the answer.

And a recent interview, Disney CEO Bob Iger - who again first pushed Marvel Studios into the TV business directly - specifically pointed to Marvel's inexperience in the TV business and descibed their situation as in over their heads, and distracting from the unit's core business: movies.

“Marvel’s a great example of that,” Iger added. “[Marvel Studios] had not been in the TV business at any significant level," Iger told Variety. "Not only did they increase their movie output, but they ended up making a number of television series, and frankly, it diluted focus and attention.”

Marvel Studios' boss Kevin Feige seemed to have seen the writing on the wall for some time. Back in 2019 he didn't discount the idea of second easons then, but The Hollywood Reporter did say he told them that Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and Moon Knight would all go to MCU movies after their first seasons. Ms. Marvel already did, so... now it's your turn Shulkie and Mr. Knight.

“There’s nothing in any way inherently off in terms of the Marvel brand,” Iger said in 2023. “I think we just have to look at what characters and stories we’re mining, and you look at the trajectory of Marvel over the next five years, you’ll see a lot of newness. We’re going to turn back to the Avengers franchise, but with a whole different set of Avengers.”

Much in the same way the MCU Phase 1 solo movies for Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and the Incredible Hulk led to the 2012 team-up in Avengers, the 2021-2022 Disney+ shows Moon Knight, She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel, and Hawkeye are leading to the 2026 team-up in Avengers 5 (which may or may not be subtitled Kang Dynasty).

If we didn't know better, we'd say Marvel Studios' Phase 5 will be the 'All-New, All-Different Marvel' era. And that's even before the X-Men show up en masse.

The next Avengers film is coming May 1, 2026, with filming to begin in the United Kingdom this year.

Keep up to date on Popverse's Marvel coverage, with these highlights: Disney CEO Bob Iger is promising Deadpool & Wolverine will be MCU's biggest movie "in a long time", how Marvel Studios is now working "much more closely" to sell Marvel comics, how Marvel Comics' boss said it was lost in 2023 (and how its finding itself again), Inside Marvel Comics' plans to fix its pricing issues, Overgrown children of the atom: Marvel's X-Men can't evolve past their '90s commercial peak, and the biggest outstanding questions of the Marvel Studios' movies & TV shows.