What Agatha All Along Has Been Telling Us About the Future of Marvel TV

As Marvel’s first TV show produced for Disney+, WandaVision was the major television event of early 2021. It tied directly into ongoing events in the Marvel Cinematic Universe while departing from the usual superhero playbook with an ambitious narrative structure that paid tribute to classic TV. The effort paid off with massive critical and commercial success, which is why it was no surprise when, later that year, the Mouse House announced that beloved character actress Kathryn Hahn would reprise her Wanda role of Agatha Harkness in a limited-run spinoff series. Although it took several years to come to fruition, Agatha All Along finally arrived in September, with Hahn joined by a cast of buzzy stars (Aubrey Plaza! Heartstopper hunk Joe Locke!) and fan-fave veterans (Patti LuPone, Debra Jo Rupp), plus the anticipation that comes from following a smash such as WandaVision. So, now that the show has concluded its nine-episode run, how’d it do? Well, like Agatha herself, the answer is complicated — and says a lot about the overall state of Marvel’s TV business right now.

We won’t have a complete picture of its Nielsen performance for a few weeks, but early data suggests Agatha launched strong when it premiered on September 18. The series landed in Nielsen’s top-ten most-streamed originals list for its first two weeks (and came in at No. 11 in week three), with its premiere week tune-in on par with what WandaVision scored right out of the gate. (Exact numerical comparisons are tricky because of differences in run times and premiere dates, though both shows premiered with two episodes.) As for Disney+ internal data, the streamer said the first episode of Agatha attracted a healthy 9.3 million global views during its first seven days on the platform, not far from the 11 million views Disney reported each episode of Loki season two averaged during its first full week of availability in November 2023. On Friday, the streamer reported that within 24 hours of premiering, the two-part finale attracted 4.6 million viewers for episode eight and 3.9 million viewers for episode nine — gains of 48 percent and 26 percent, respectively, versus the one-day averages for the premiere.

Those last numbers might be the most important piece of data we have yet to evaluate Agatha’s overall performance. While the Marvel brand is strong enough to get a sizable number of viewers to check out almost any title — especially a spinoff — what matters more is whether the audience sticks with the show after premiere week and word of mouth drives a significant amount of binge-watching in the weeks following the finale. A TV analyst who writes for the Ankler under the pen name Entertainment Strategy Guy notes that while WandaVision’s first episode performed well for Disney+, its status as a smash hit wasn’t cemented until later in its run. “That series really grew its audience week-over-week, getting up to 15 million hours for the finale and lasting ten weeks on the charts,” he says, adding that it still ranks as Marvel’s second-best freshman season in terms of total hours viewed, behind only Loki. “For a half hour, that’s why it’s remembered as a strong, strong performer.”

So far, it doesn’t appear that Agatha is having the same sort of Nielsen surge as WandaVision, but the show hasn’t seen its audience fall off a cliff, either: Its ratings were steady during its second and third weeks. A Marvel insider tells Vulture that since the two-episode premiere, the “continuation rates” for Agatha — i.e., how many subscribers returned every week to stream the latest episode — “are some of the strongest we’ve ever seen,” a claim reinforced by those finale numbers. What’s more, the same Marvel source said there’s a chance some viewers put off watching Agatha until all episodes were released on Halloween eve, turning the series into a spooky-season binge. We’ll know more when Nielsen data for the finale epiosdes comes out, most likely in early December, though the one-day data Disney released last week is a good sign.

Though the viewing stats suggest Agatha was at least a modest hit with audiences, by themselves they’re not enough to make a judgment about the show’s overall success, particularly when compared to WandaVision or Marvel shows launched in 2021 and 2022. For one thing, Marvel is in the middle of a well-publicized transition phase, particularly on the TV front. WandaVision heralded the era of MCU-set series influencing its big-screen stories; watching the show helped audiences understand what would happen in upcoming movies, and story lines and characters in the movies sprung directly from what happened on TV. “There was a lot of attention paid to the interconnectivity between shows and films during the first generation of shows,” our Marvel insider admits. With Agatha and some upcoming releases, however, “We’re looking for ways to tell stories that don’t fit into the MCU,” the source says, echoing comments Marvel TV and streaming boss Brad Winderbaum made earlier this year.

To a degree, this shift could initially hurt the ratings or buzz for Marvel’s TV shows, since there won’t be the same sort of urgency to watch right away: You won’t be missing out on spoilers or hints about upcoming films if you fail to watch Agatha as soon as it debuts. Longer-term, however, decoupling the TV shows from the MCU — while still leaning on fan-favorite characters from the broader Marvel library — could widen the potential audience beyond its most committed fans. “I don’t like the phrase ‘superhero fatigue,’ but people are feeling overwhelmed by the lore,” says entertainment-industry writer and podcaster Joanna Robinson, co-author of MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios. “Marvel made a name off of everything being interconnected, but after Avengers: Endgame, there was this sheer tonnage of things audiences at home had to keep up with. It was harder for casual fans to just dip in.” By contrast, “Even though it will help you understand it, you can watch Agatha without having seen WandaVision,” Robinson notes. “That’s a goal going forward for the TV shows: You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in Marvel to understand what’s going on.”

Beyond the creative elements, Agatha also represents a shift in how Marvel is structuring the production of its TV shows. The first generation of Marvel series for Disney+ essentially duplicated how the studio makes its films, with in-house producers in charge of calling the shots. “They tried to disrupt the art of making television,” Robinson says, and while that sounded good on paper, in practice, “It was a constant push and pull between whoever was head writer and whoever was director and lead producer.” It also led to a decline in the quality control of Marvel TV shows: The same team overseeing a flood of feature films at the start of the 2020s was also cranking out what ended up being three or four TV shows a year. Projects like last year’s Secret Invasion — which Robinson deems “a complete disaster” — ended up with bad buzz and not-great ratings.

In Marvel’s defense, its film-centric approach made more sense when the studios’ shows were essentially feature films broken up into episodes. But Marvel now seems to be moving to a place where its TV goal is to just make … TV shows. That means that series such as Agatha, which is the first in the Disney+ era to open with a “Marvel Television” banner instead of just “Marvel,” now have dedicated showrunners (in this case, Jac Schaeffer) who oversee both the writing of episodes and the overall production — just like 90 percent of all TV series. Plus, starting with the premiere of Daredevil: Born Again in March, Marvel will once again start leaning into projects designed to run for multiple seasons and with longer episode counts rather than blockbuster one-offs. It’s a throwback to how Marvel made TV during its Netflix era, with multi-season shows such as Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and, yes, the original Daredevil streaming series (current Marvel overlord Kevin Feige was not involved with that phase of the studio’s TV history).

The pundit known as Entertainment Strategy Guy thinks this approach makes sense based on the data he’s looked at for Disney’s other, non-Marvel series. “Subsequent Mandalorian seasons have done even better than the initial outing, and Loki season two performed better than most other MCU/Star Wars Disney+ originals,” he says, adding that this shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who’s studied TV history. “The old TV system was built on making a number of shows, then keeping viewers coming back to their favorites. One-offs or limited series will struggle to do that.” ESG also thinks Marvel would benefit from doing fewer shows each year and focusing on well-known or popular names within its comic universe. “One of the likely causes of the recent Marvel downturns is the move to increasingly obscure characters,” he says. To that end, Robinson believes Daredevil: Born Again — whose title hero has already had movies and a TV show built around him— “is going to be a smash hit.”

While Marvel obviously wants big numbers for all its shows, what’s even more vital for its TV output is cost efficiency. Back when WandaVision and Falcon and the Winter Soldier were greenlit, we were living in the age of Peak Marvel and Peak TV. Streaming budgets were seemingly unlimited, and the idea was to spend whatever it took to get consumers to sign up for new platforms such as Disney+. But now, almost exactly five years to the day D+ debuted, streamers are relentlessly focused on slashing costs and producing only as many hours of television as needed to keep existing subscribers from churning away. Instead of making TV shows that cost as much as or more than giant feature films, streamers are looking for shows that cost less and return year after year. And rather than brag to investors about content slates packed with budget-busting blockbusters, execs are talking openly about how little they’re spending.

Last month, Marvel TV’s Winderbaum told Variety that Agatha ranks as Marvel’s “least expensive show” for Disney+ yet. “We are looking to make these shows for a responsible cost,” he said, noting that Agatha made sparing use of costly computer-generated special effects in favor of practical effects (which cost much, much less). He didn’t put a specific number on Agatha, but Variety noted that Marvel spent about $40 million for its five-episode limited series Echo, or about $8 million per episode. That’s about one-third the reported per-episode budgets of shows such as WandaVision or Falcon and the Winter Soldier. But even if Marvel is spending half of what it had been on TV shows, the dramatically diminished costs change the success equation for something like Agatha. If its cumulative viewership caps out at, say, two-thirds of WandaVision’s — but does so at half or one-third the price tag — Disney will consider that a win. As the first season of Netflix’s Squid Game and Baby Reindeer demonstrated, some of TV’s biggest successes are with shows produced on modest budgets.

This is not to say that Marvel (or Disney+) are suddenly looking to make their future TV slates resemble what you’d find on network or cable TV 20 years ago. Agatha may be relatively inexpensive, but you need only watch it to know it wasn’t made on the cheap. But what the studio and its sister streamer have realized is that building a successful long-term series business means shedding some of the (slightly) irrational exuberance that marked Disney’s Peak TV programming philosophy. So far, that has translated into experimenting with different kinds of projects — both big, broad shows like Daredevil and slightly more niche ideas like Agatha or Echo — and seeing how audiences respond.

It also means making fewer shows (and movies) overall, not only to save money but to maintain quality control. As Robinson notes, one of Marvel’s calling cards during the apex of the MCU was that pretty much every movie was good — some were even great. “The lowest you’d ever did was like a B+,” she says. “But that was not the case with their TV shows or the post-Endgame movies.” Doing just two — or sometimes three — live-action series a year should decrease the likelihood of ending up with a dud; keeping prices in line reduces the financial downside should one slip through anyway.

All of which brings us back to Agatha and how to think about its performance. The buzz around the show didn’t start anywhere near the level of WandaVision, and based on early ratings, it didn’t immediately grow the way its predecessor did. But the reviews were great and online chatter picked up in the latter half of its run — particularly its final three episodes, which revealed a slew of twists about the title character and her teen sidekick (played by Locke). Our Marvel source says the series has brought in more female and young-adult viewers than other recent live-action Marvel series, and as noted earlier, its lower price tag means Agatha could end up being more cost-efficient than other titles that brought in more eyeballs but broke the bank.

Normally, Disney would tell us how much of a success it believes Agatha to be by ordering a second season of the show or greenlighting some sort of spinoff. But since Marvel positioned the show as a limited series, and it was already part of a planned trilogy, that’s unlikely to happen (though it’s not impossible, as we saw earlier this year with the surprise renewal of Shōgun). Instead, it might be best to think of Agatha as part of a broader experiment Marvel TV is conducting. “I think Marvel is trying to figure out what gives them a better chance for success — shows that have the buy-in from the Marvel faithful, or shows that can play broader,” says Robinson. “I don’t think they really know.”