You Will Need Disney+ To Understand “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness”

Disney+ is going all out to make subscribing to the new streaming service as appealing as possible. Now we’ve learned that you’ll need to watch the upcoming Loki series and WandaVision to understand Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.

Disney+ launches in just four days and they’ve been offering a ton of great perks to attract subscribers.  Verizon customers will get the service for free, D23 attendees got a special 3-year discount, and there’s a few bundling options out there.  But now they’re tying in programming on the platform to the record-setting Marvel Cinematic Universe in a way that makes a subscription basically unavoidable for the die hards.  Want to understand Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness?  Then you’ve got to watch the Loki series and WandaVision, too, or you’ll be a bit lost.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has always been fairly well tied together.  In order to understand any of the Avengers films, you need to have seen the majority of the solo films that preceded it.  But the television shows haven’t always tied in as closely.  While Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter both spun off from the films, watching them was not a prerequisite for understanding them.  Sometimes it did add a bit more enjoyment, but you could still enjoy the movies without being up to date with the show.  The Netflix series of shows, while also nodding to certain events in the films, were also generally something entirely separate. 

But Loki and WandaVision are about to change this trend, it seems.  In an interview with Bloomberg, Feige confirms this:

If you want to understand everything in future Marvel movies, he says, you’ll probably need a Disney+ subscription, because events from the new shows will factor into forthcoming films such as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The Scarlet Witch will be a key character in that movie, and Feige points out that the Loki series will tie in, too. “I’m not sure we’ve actually acknowledged that before,” he says. “But it does.”

While the Avengers portion of the MCU has ostensibly come to a close, we are embarking on a brand new chapter for the franchise, and this streaming platform is going to play a vital part of it.  Loki and WandaVision will be two of many confirmed MCU shows on the platform, alongside the new Falcon and Winter Soldier series, Hawkeye, She-Hulk, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, and What If.  Some of these may be more tied in than others, but nonetheless it seems that a huge portion of the ongoing story will be on the new streaming platform, and we’re all going to have to keep up with it there as well as popping over to a movie theater a couple times a year for the films themselves.

Both WandaVision and Loki are scheduled to be released in early 2021, with Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness currently scheduled for May 7th, 2021.  It’s going to be an intense few months of programming that all ties together, but I’m looking forward to it.  The MCU is at its best when the plot is focused and brings everything home together.  Based on these release dates, it seems these three titles will do exactly that. 

Thank you, Disney.  I’m ready for Spring 2021 to be intense as hell. Bring it!

Author: Angel Wilson

Angel is the admin of The Geekiary and a geek culture commentator. They earned a BA in Film & Digital Media from UC Santa Cruz. They have contributed to various podcasts and webcasts including An Englishman in San Diego, Free to Be Radio, and Genre TV for All. They identify as queer.

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