Integrated Media Is Fun For Committed Fans and Less Fun for Casual Viewers

In the old days there was always this separation of things on TV and things in movies.  It's why Tom Welling, the Superboyman on Smallville could never be Superman in a movie.  Or why no matter many crimes Ezra Miller commits, DC/WB will never let Grant Gustin be the Flash in a movie.  Or why Clark Gregg could never return to big screen Marvel stuff unless it was in the past.  Or why Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist never showed up in any MCU movies no matter what was going down in New York, where they pretty much all live.

But largely thanks to Star Wars that's all begun to change.  Ironically I think it began with Solo when Darth Maul appeared in a cookie scene, which was a reference to his story arc in the Clone Wars TV show.  Then at the end of the first season of The Mandalorian, Moff Gideon pulls out the darksaber, which was seen in The Clone Wars and Rebels.  And then they amped it up a notch in season two when Ahsoka Tano appeared and got a spinoff show that will probably include live action versions of a lot of Rebels characters.  In the last couple of episodes, Katee Sackhoff reprised her role in The Clone Wars and Rebels as Bo Katan.  Then in The Book of Boba Fett near the end there was an appearance by bounty hunter Cad Bane who was in The Clone Wars and The Bad Batch.  And then sometimes now it works in reverse like when bounty hunter Fennec Shand of The Mandalorian and Book of Boba Fett showed up on The Bad Batch. 

So instead of TV and movies being separate, they are fully integrated with each other now to make one continuity.  Since they started doing shows on Disney+, Marvel has also got into the act now.  Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness actually leans pretty heavily on WandaVision since the Scarlet Witch is the main villain of the movie.  The Captain Peggy Carter from What If...? also appears as does Anson Mount's Black Bolt from the failed Inhumans TV show and Patrick Stewart's Professor X from the original Fox X-Men movies.

If you watch all that stuff then it's pretty cool how it all crosses over and connects and stuff.  But for casual viewers who might not have seen everything, it probably makes it less fun because you're not going to get all the references or know where all this stuff comes from.

I guess part of the idea is cross-marketing so you'll want to get Disney+ and watch shows like WandaVision because stuff from that will pop up in Dr. Strange 2 or Captain Marvel 2 or whatever.  I'm not sure how well that actually works with people who are less rabid about the MCU.  I don't really care that much though I did watch that show ahead of time--most of it in fast-forward.

Since it's probably been successful for Disney, I wouldn't be surprised if you see it more for other brands too.  Though first other brands really have to have TV shows and movies to cross over.  That's really the problem with Star Trek for Paramount+ in that right now they have no movies.  It would be cool to see Mount's Chris Pike alongside Chris Pine's Kirk and Patrick Stewart's Picard and Michael Burnham of Discovery and hell, why not live action characters from Lower Decks and Prodigy?  Multiverses are the in thing right now.  While DC practically invented multiverse crossovers, DC/WB would have to get their shit together in a way I'm not sure they can ever really manage for a big screen version.

But the more TV and movie franchises become integrated, probably the more annoyed casual fans are going to get.  Because really it's like if you're reading a comic book story and there are chunks of it that take place in other titles that you haven't read and don't really want to spend hundreds of dollars collecting them all to read the entire story.  That happens with big crossover events like The Blackest Night or House of M or Civil War or whatever the current Marvel thing is; there are stories in pretty much every title but who wants to spend the money to read all of them?

So if you're like me you just read the main title and hope for the best.  Still it can sometimes be disconcerting to wonder, Wait, who's that?  How'd they get there?  When did that happen?

It's kind of the danger of integrating TV and movie properties.