Marvel Television’s new marching orders are now on the record, and they’re built around the wrong diagnosis.
On Friday’s mailbag episode of The Town, Puck’s Matt Belloni laid out the new mandate: “The Marvel TV mandate is not to do these big expensive limited series that connect into the larger MCU.”
His reasoning: “They believe, and I think they’re right, that that diluted the brand. It made the Marvel movies feel like homework and not special.”
There’s just one problem with the “homework” explanation.
Fans didn’t stop watching Marvel’s Disney+ shows because they connected to the movies.
They stopped watching because too many of the shows weren’t worth watching.
“Homework” is really just the superhero fatigue argument in a different package. Blame the format, the volume, and the connectivity, anything except the content (blame the fans, too).
Fans Watched Loki. Then Marvel Lost Them
The actual viewing pattern doesn’t support the homework theory.
When Marvel delivered, fans had no problem doing the supposed assignment.
Loki charted on Nielsen across two seasons, and its entire premise is still tied directly into the larger MCU. Disney just featured the TVA at D23, and Tom Hiddleston is confirmed for Avengers: Doomsday.
Then came Hawkeye, She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel, Secret Invasion, et al.
The audience didn’t suddenly decide interconnected television was too much work. It did what audiences always do when the content stops delivering: it stopped watching.
Not the “genre.” Not the “format.” Not the “number” of shows.
It stopped watching the shows.
Marvel’s movies went through the same thing after Endgame. A run of disappointments produced years of “superhero fatigue” talk, right up until Spider-Man: Brand New Day delivered the biggest opening weekend in box office history.
The audience was still there. It just needed a reason to show up.
The Bigger Problem: The Viewers Never Came Back
That’s the part the homework argument misses.
Once Marvel burned through its Disney+ audience, those viewers didn’t automatically return when a recognizable character showed up.
Daredevil: Born Again is the most-streamed Disney+ original of 2026 and still went 0-for-17 on Nielsen across two seasons.
Think about that.
Marvel can call Born Again its biggest Disney+ original of the year while the show remains invisible on the industry’s standard streaming chart.
That’s not an audience overwhelmed by continuity. That’s an audience that left the platform and hasn’t been convinced to come back.
Star Wars followed the exact same path.
Its Disney+ shows shed over 70 percent of their viewership, while the brand lost 85 percent of its theatrical audience.
Nobody needed eight episodes of Disney+ television to understand a Star Wars movie. They weren’t even being released. The content simply stopped giving enough people a reason to care.
Case in point, The Mandalorian seasons 1 and 2 had high viewership. Season 3 was awful, and then those fans didn’t turn up for The Mandalorian & Grogu in theaters, the lowest-grossing Star Wars movie of all time. Starfighter is now being impacted as a result.
Cheap And Standalone Doesn’t Mean Good
Even studio executives have said out loud what the real issue is.
DC Studios co-head Peter Safran rejected superhero fatigue outright, calling it “mediocre movie fatigue”.
Then Supergirl collapsed toward a quarter-billion-dollar loss, making his point for him.
Sony’s Tom Rothman, sitting on the all-time opening record, said it plainest: “The audience is the boss.”
That’s it.
Audiences don’t tire of superheroes. They reject poor content, in every format, every time.
Which brings us back to Marvel’s new mandate.
Belloni cited Puck colleague Julia Alexander’s reporting that Marvel has multiple projects in development — the same reporting we covered last week — with the thinking that they’ll be standalones, leaning more into animation, and “not necessarily homework for understanding what the movies are.”
That may make Marvel TV cheaper. It may make the shows easier to skip without affecting the movies.
Neither makes them better.
Wonder Man just got canceled because the viewership didn’t justify the costs, while the Punisher special missed Nielsen in its debut week.
Those aren’t problems caused by too much MCU connectivity.
Marvel TV Only Needs One Mandate
Standalone or interconnected. Cheap or expensive. Live-action or animated.
None of it matters if the audience doesn’t want to watch.
Marvel spent years trying to solve declining interest with release strategies, pivots, formats, and now a new definition of what its TV shows should be.
The audience has been giving them the answer the entire time.
Make shows people actually want to watch.
