It looks like we’ll have to wait a bit longer for She-Hulk’s Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) debut. Thankfully, though, the delay won’t be too long.
For those who may have missed the news: She-Hulk: The Lawyer, the next MCU TV series to hit Disney Plus, has a new release date.However, Marvel fans will just have to wait another 24 hours for it to arrive and the She-Hulk will land Thursday, August 18 – It was originally scheduled to launch on Wednesday, August 17th.
New Marvel heroes. Brand new night. New episodes of Marvel Studios’ #SheHulk: Attorney at Law will air Thursday, August 18th exclusively on @DisneyPlus. pic.twitter.com/oc6WVN2CtBAugust 3, 2022
So, what’s the deal here? Marvel Studios has been accustomed to releasing its Disney Plus shows on Wednesdays since Loki Season 1 launched in June 2021. Why change now? It turns out that changing She-Hulk’s release date to a Thursday slot actually made sense.
For starters, Marvel’s newest TV business doesn’t have to struggle with the next major Star Wars production — read our guide on how to watch the Star Wars movies and TV shows in order — to get audience’s attention.
Andor, the next Star Wars TV series, hits Disney Plus on Wednesday, September 21st. The show will focus on Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor as he evolves from rogue gangster to key member of the Rebel Alliance and follows in the footsteps of Obi-Wan, Kenobi and The Mandalorian at Disney midweek published on streaming media.
If She-Hulk kept its Wednesday release date, the two shows would be vying for viewers once Andor’s mid-September rolls around. That means She-Hulk’s final four episodes will be released on the same day as Andor’s first six — Andor will premiere on September 21 with three episodes, so it’s a higher number in this case.
Why is this important? Well, it’s not in the studio’s best interest for the two Disney-owned franchises to go head-to-head — and neither is it a good thing for Marvel or Lucasfilm, which make She-Hulk and Andor, respectively. The two Disney subsidiaries were already vying for audiences when Ms. Marvel and some Obi-Wan episodes launched at the same time in June — a distribution strategy we thought would make it difficult for a show to attract the viewership it deserved at the time number of people.
According to reports samba tv (opens in new tab), “Ms. Marvel” played in just 775,000 U.S. households in the first five days of its premiere. Well, there must be other mitigating circumstances behind this low number – Ms. Marvel is positioned as a Gen Z-style show, her relative obscurity among regular MCU fans, and the previously unknown protagonist Iman Villani is Three explanations.
Even so, when some of their episodes aired simultaneously from June 8 to June 22, Ms. Marvel was clearly struggling to compete with Obi-Wan, a better-known character. Obviously, this is a release date experiment that doesn’t apply to Disney and its subsidiaries, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see Disney change tack and release She-Hulk and Andor on different days.
So why not release She-Hulk on Friday? Likewise, Marvel has previous forms to do so, with new episodes of WandaVision, along with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, landing before the weekend. But the answer is simple, really: There’s less competition on Thursday than on Friday.
If Marvel chooses to release its next MCU Phase 4 project on Friday, She-Hulk will face more competition. Netflix, Prime Video, and Apple TV Plus releases their new content on Friday, so if it arrives on this day, She-Hulk will definitely be against it.
Of course, She-Hulk might object to what the streaming can offer — after all, the quality of production on these services isn’t always up to par. Yes, there are some top Prime Video shows, premium Netflix shows and great Apple TV Plus shows to enjoy. But there’s always some duds in the trio’s work, so the Marvel TV series can hold its own among the less-than-stellar ones.
The question for She-Hulk, though, is whether it meets a Stranger Things or Squid Game-style show; one that’s hugely popular with Netflix’s fanbase or another successful streamer. As such, it’s a safer bet for She-Hulk, by doing so to easily shrug off competition from streaming releases such as Peacock and Paramount Plus.
It’s unclear if future Marvel shows will also air on Thursday. This may just be a one-off experiment by Disney to see if the MCU and Star Wars TV series could both succeed if they launched on different days. Regardless, given what happened between Ms. Marvel and Obi-Wan, She-Hulk’s new Disney Plus release date makes perfect sense — it’ll be interesting to see how Thursday’s release slot experiment pans out.
For more MCU-based content, check out our Marvel movie ordering guide, or read Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the final superhero movie in Marvel Phase 4.
