Do superhero stories work better as TV shows?

Superhero TV shows have usually played second fiddle to superhero films, but after much trial and error, they’re finding their footing in the streaming era.

Comic book fans were treated to two big new superhero stories over the past week and change: Zack Snyder’s Justice League and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. While they couldn’t be more different, they both debuted on streaming services: Justice League on HBO Max and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney+. While superhero movies and TV shows on streaming services is far from new, these two could be turning points in how studios make comic book adaptations.

What do I mean by this? When we take a look at Zack Snyder’s Justice League, it’s clear why it couldn’t work in theaters. The movie is just over four hours long, and spends a ton of time setting up the backstory, personality and motivations of each main character. Compare this to the 2017 theatrical cut of Justice League, which runs only two hours, and it becomes stark how much was absent. Scenes establishing the characters, the villain’s motivation and important chunks of the story were all removed, with nothing to replace them but some weak comedy moments. The extra time in Snyder’s redux provides much-needed context that was missing from the theatrical release.

At the same time, four hours is a long while to spend in the theater. Most of it is necessary to tell the story, but would have been asking a lot of moviegoers. (Although let’s be honest, they could cut out some slo-mo and certain scenes and get it down to three-plus hours without much difficulty.) It works better at home, where people can stretch out and take breaks, even watching the story in chunks over a period of days if they wish. The movie even provides markers for where to stop and start by breaking itself into chapters. This is no different from television shows like Daredevil, which at times feel like longer movies broken up into discrete episodes.

The TV miniseries is booming on streaming services, from The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix to Small Axe on Amazon Prime Video to WandaVision on Disney+, which is especially pertinent to our discussion. These shows can point the way for other superhero stories to follow. Imagine versions of Avengers: Infinity War or Endgame that allow the story to pause and breathe without feeling obligated to jump to the next fight scene so everything fits into the already lengthy runtime.

That’s exactly what Zack Snyder’s Justice League is, and for the most part, it works. The same goes for all the Marvel shows already on or coming to Disney+. Take The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the studio’s latest effort. The premiere episode takes its time reintroducing viewers to characters, introducing a new faction, and expanding on little details. This leisurely pace would not have worked for a theatrical release, and important character scenes like Sam interacting with his family or Bucky in therapy would’ve most likely been cut down or omitted entirely. But because it’s a TV show, we can relax in these new spaces confident that future episodes will bring more action, as indeed the second episode did.

In a way, we can view this as a renaissance for superhero television shows. Marvel and DC have struggled to find their footing outside of movies for years. Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter found audiences, but they weren’t as relevant to the overall MCU experience as the movies. Likewise, DC has found success with its lineup of shows on The CW, and even had an Endgame-like crossover event with the “Crisis on Infinite Earths” storyline, but it came nowhere near equaling the scope of the Marvel movie universe, nor was it as consistently great.

The next hurdle is seeing whether these shows can sustain themselves beyond one season. WandaVision seems to be playing it safe by having only one season, which solves the issue some of the CW shows have where some seasons seem less relevant than others and waste time on storylines that go nowhere. But if a creative can sustain the creativity and quality of a show like WandaVision over several seasons, they could take things to the next level. I’m interested to see where superhero movies and TV shows go from here, now that their horizons have expanded even further.

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