Week-to-Week: How a Holiday Special clarified my relationship to the MCU
Musings on the overlapping rituals of Marvel's 2022 output
Hey, subscribers—if you missed the news, both Apple and Android users can now join the conversation on the Substack App’s “chat” function (which they do still plan to bring to desktop users). In celebration, I’ve started a chat for paid subscribers about our holiday viewing rituals, which I’ll likely end up writing a bit more about as we get closer to the holiday.
And if you’re not currently a subscriber, you can join us below.
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Marvel released the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, the second of two “Special Presentations” that have landed on Disney+ in the past few months. Alongside Halloween’s Werewolf by Night, it’s the latest wrinkle added to the MCU’s cultural footprint, now almost two years into the Disney+ “phase” of the franchise.
The two specials share a clear tie to the holiday calendar, yes, but they showcase different creative impulses. Werewolf by Night uses the holiday as an excuse to dig deeper into the roster of Marvel characters, with no clear intentions of integrating them into larger storytelling. By comparison, the Guardians special uses major parts of the franchise, seeing a clear synergy between the vibe of the Guardians and the themes and hijinks of an average Christmas special. And in both cases, the specials are successful: Werewolf by Night is stylish and fun, while the Guardians special taps into the comic sincerity of its source material to deliver a concentrated dose of Christmas cheer.
Taken as part of Marvel’s larger output, though, the ritualized function of seasonal specials like this is worth considering in more detail. Marvel’s theatrical output has consistently been built on the idea of ritual: a new MCU film is released, and those of us who are invested will instinctively buy tickets and show up opening weekend. And the introduction of Disney+ series has merged this ritual—which used to be twice-per-year, before shifting to three beginning in 2017—with the weekly release patterns of television. And we can now add seasonal viewing to this pattern, whether in rewatching past year’s specials or a new expectation that Marvel could check-in for key holidays like a 22-episode broadcast sitcom would (Ms. Marvel Graduates! Captain America’s Fourth of July Spectacular! The Eternals at the First Thanksgiving!).
There is immense power in these rituals, and it’s a huge part of why MCU films have remained huge draws at a time when overall box office performances is struggling, and why Disney+ has been able to far surpass the company’s initial subscriber growth projections (albeit not in a way that’s profitable, which is returning CEO Bob Iger’s problem in the years ahead). However, there is also an unavoidable feeling of diminishing returns when these distinct but nonetheless overlapping rituals crowd together, as it becomes progressively harder to differentiate between them.
This is not an exclusively Marvel problem within Disney, of course. I wrote a newsletter earlier this year about Turning Red and the stigma that was once held by “straight to streaming” releases, and the past few weeks created another chapter in this story with the streaming launch of Disenchanted and the theatrical disaster of Strange World’s release. We could also connect this to Netflix’s experimentation with a limited one-week run for Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion, which is now back in the Netflix vault until December 23 despite strong momentum in theaters over the Thanksgiving holiday. We’re all part of an enormous experiment regarding our ritual patterns of viewing, but it’s not a simple A/B test—it’s more of an ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ test, where every instance is anecdotal based on the particular project, the moment we’re in, and the parties involved.
What makes Marvel the most interesting, I would argue, is that it’s asking a core audience to extend their rituals across new contexts, while attempting to retain the original ritual that created this audience to begin with. It’s distinct because Star Wars has conspicuously been absent from theaters in the period that their television output has increased, with no films currently scheduled. While The Mandalorian and The Rise of Skywalker briefly overlapped, for the most part Star Wars simply asked audiences to shift their ritual relationship to television, which helped launch the service. But it was also notable that the Star Wars film franchise went into hibernation because of Solo’s box office failure, which tested the ritualized theatrical releases and showed audiences weren’t as motivated to go see a second Star Wars film in six months as Disney presumed they were. The transition to television was a solution to this problem, and we’ve yet to see how it will impact the attempt to get people back into theaters for Taika Waititi’s under-development project in a few years.
Kevin Feige is trying to have it all, though (including his own Star War)—Marvel is now every ritual rolled up in one, and as I’ve written about previously, it has somewhat flattened my own experience with the MCU. 2022 has been about accepting that the ritual is changing: whether I’m heading to a theater or logging into Disney+, I’m doing it in order to keep the train on the tracks, without a clear sense of the destination. The lack of “excitement” has been exacerbated by the fact the three theatrical releases this year were all sequels debuting alongside television projects that were introducing new characters/vibes to the franchise, which necessitated a lot of gear shifts where once there was a pretty clear idea of what a new Marvel movie was and did.
The result has been a disconnect from the discourse that used to surround these projects. I wrote about Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law this year here at Episodic Medium, reflected on the finale of Moon Knight, and offered some thoughts about Thor: Love and Thunder in a weekly newsletter—accordingly, I’m still absolutely more invested in the MCU than your average person. But by the time I got to Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, I found myself there on opening night, more or less enjoying the film, but with nothing that I really wanted to say about it. And I’m likely to pass off the baton of the MCU shows to another contributor in the new year, because while I still feel qualified to wax poetic about the state of the MCU on a weekly basis, I don’t think it actually matches my instinctual response to the “always on” era of the franchise.
Which brings us back to the special presentations. As I was watching the Guardians Holiday Special, I realized that it embraces the less “essential” state of MCU content in our current moment. It never aspires to be essential viewing, and clearly announces through its tone and its seasonality that this is not intended to reshape the MCU as we know it. There’s elements of character development—particularly Peter and Mantis’ relationship—and an easter egg with Gamora gifting Rocket Bucky’s arm, and I suppose there’s a bigger question about how the Guardians ended up acquiring Knowhere that you could read through the lens of mythos. But ultimately, I would argue that from the moment it kicks off with Old 97’s in full alien makeup Purple Monkey Dishwashering Christmas, all the burdens and inertia of the modern MCU experience faded away, letting a Kevin Bacon-infused romp just be what it was.
What I’ve discovered in the weeks since is that the ritual of a holiday special feels particularly attuned to my current relationship with the MCU. Whereas I’ve had absolutely zero interest in rewatching any of the films released this year, or revisiting any of the TV shows, I gladly put on the special a second time while I was finishing off my Christmas village, and added the two songs from the special to my Christmas playlists. Whereas so much of the MCU has become ephemeral and procedural, the nature of holiday special rituals is that we’re meant to return to them, and can do so without the feeling that it’s…well, work.
I don’t know that the special was strong enough to enter my yearly rotation, and it’s possible that the churn of the MCU—including Guardians Vol. 3—will make it harder to revisit anyway, but it was the closest I came this year to the sense of satisfaction that I used to get from being an active participant in the grand MCU experience.
Episodic Observations
I didn’t end up with a lot to say about Wakanda Forever, but a lot of that has to do with the understandable choice to live in the shadow of the first film. The way they handled Boseman’s death was effective, and I appreciate the commitment to having the series’ villains be “people who are actually right, but whose methods are suspect,” but it did mean that it was a sequel that struggled to break new ground, which was a pattern this year.
I know there’s a lot of reasons for this, but it’s so weird to have such clarity over the film side of the MCU with release dates for every film, whereas the TV projects are just vague “early 2023 or mid-2023.” I keep trying to plan out the calendars for the new year, and there’s just no way to map out anything. (I’m presuming Secret Invasion won’t release until after The Mandalorian returns in early March, but even What If?—which I don’t think we’ll cover unless there’s a surprising amount of demand—doesn’t have a release date).
I don’t think I’m going to outright revisit it, as I ended up watching most of it twice after getting my parents caught up last holiday season, but Hawkeye is probably the MCU series I’m most likely to revisit, and this would certainly be the time of year to do so.
I’ve fallen behind on Fleishman is in Trouble and The Peripheral, but that’s in part because I finally got around to the first season of Canadian co-production Sort Of on HBO Max, which returned for a second season last week. I’ll likely check back in to write about the second season once it concludes in the U.S., but if you’re looking for a timely dramedy with 20-minute episodes, you should absolutely catch up on Bilal Baig’s Toronto-set exploration of gender fluidity.
I've always felt holiday specials, especially Christmas themed ones that are billed as specials and not just an episode that takes place at Christmas, are not quite a part of the whole. I mean thinking of the SyFy & USA blue sky era holiday specials they never had any lasting consequences and sometimes didn't even fit into what had happened in the previous season (this is most notable for me in the Haven Christmas special where the previous season finale had Duke & Nathan fighting and a gun going off with a cliffhanger of not knowing who got shot and then it wasn't even noted in the Christmas special but was a huge part of the next season premiere). I feel this with a lot of the British holiday specials as well (though not all, see All Creatures Great & Small). So for me that's kinda how I view the MCU holiday specials
I tried watching this last night - as someone who has watched nearly every bit of MCU content (for better, for worse, and for even worse), I couldn't get past the first 25 mins.
I was shocked by how naff it was. A janky animation; an awkward song; a couple of heroes bungling around Los Angeles. A single 'generic space planet' set, and some location stuff around L.A. It just felt a bit... cheap? And underwritten? And hollow?
Perhaps I was in a bad mood. Perhaps it's just a pastiche of something so uniquely North American that it's not hitting the required nostalgia buttons. But for me - this was irredeemable crap.