Any fans geared up for She-Hulk’s premiere will have to wait a bit longer, 24 hours to be more specific, the brand-new MCU series moves from its original Wednesday slot to Thursdays according to Marvel Studios’ own announcement.
Up to now, Marvel shows on Disney Plus have shuffled between releasing new episodes on Friday and Wednesday, with the Loki being the one series that moved the MCU to the middle of the week as opposed to WandaVision and The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. However, with Disney also having to juggle new Marvel content with its equally popular Star Wars spinoffs, the company has tinkered its approach several times in order to find the perfect streaming cadence.
That’s likely to be the main culprit here, as Marvel confirmed She-Hulk will permanently move to Thursdays, starting with its premiere in just a couple of weeks on August 18, although no statement was made on whether this will affect other MCU content. The move also comes on the back of Andor's latest trailer pushing back its release almost a month later, though the Rogue One prequel will come out on the same days as the animated Star Wars: The Bad Batch in late September.
Disney’s most recent experiment saw Ms. Marvel and Obi-Wan Kenobi briefly overlap with each other, a puzzling decision that is speculated to have had a small negative impact on viewership on the first few days upon their release. The return to separate Marvel and Star Wars days in all likeliness will spread content better and provide further analytics results for the company.
The release timing for streaming shows is surely a key component of Disney's content strategy moving forwards, and though it’s beyond doubt that executives have allowed room for experimentation, some of these decisions are somewhat questionable. This topic will become crucial, especially once Marvel starts churning more content like the animated What If…?’s second season or Spider-Man: Freshman Year, which could coincide with live-action production, the same way it’s happened for Star Wars already.
Even when movies like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness have been added to streaming, these also come out the same day as new episodes for Ms. Marvel, thus posing a similar conundrum to Andor and The Bad Batch next month of fans having to choose which they should allocate their time to.
She-Hulk will start streaming on Disney Plus on August 18, 2022.