Doctor Strange 2 fixes WandaVision’s biggest problem
It’s only been about a year and a half since Disney Plus launched its first Marvel Cinematic Universe TV series, WandaVision. But in terms of the cultural landscape, that feels like a decade ago. With so many MCU shows and films since then, it’s easy to forget how confused and frustrated some viewers were over the ending of WandaVision, and how contentious the final episode was among the MCU stalwart. But it’s worth revisiting now that Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is out, because the new movie retroactively makes a lot of WandaVision’s more baffling decisions make far more sense. With the series’ unaddressed questions finally cleared up, WandaVision seems much more satisfying in retrospect.
We were all emerging into a brave, alien new entertainment world when WandaVision launched in January 2021. Disney Plus had a strong launch in November 2019, but it spent its first year largely reliant on the Disney archive, much of which was still licensed to other streaming platforms. By 2021, it was still unclear what the streaming service’s original-content plan would eventually become, and whether it had the long-term clout to challenge streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon or if it would just live on as a kind of well-stocked online library. (At least by that point it was fairly clear it wouldn’t quietly shutter after a few ignominious months, like Quibi did in December 2020.)
In January 2021, practically all significant theatrical movies, the year’s MCU offerings included, were eitherbeing postponed or morphing into unheard-of direct-to-streaming releases. And nobody knew what a Disney Plus MCU TV show was going to look like, because WandaVision was the first.
It wound up being the most enthusiastically and
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