Was ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’ a Success?

Of all the major franchises to dominate pop culture, Marvel Studios’ Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) may just have the longest unbroken winning streak in history. From Iron Man to Spider-Man: Far From Home, the franchise has grossed over $22 billion dollars worldwide. Even the movies you don’t personally like (Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor: The Dark World) made bank and were well-received enough at the time to not snap this franchise out of existence. Read enough interviews with the creators behind these properties and they’re pretty up front about the fact that they don’t want to be the one responsible for Marvel’s first major flop—a flop so bad that the franchise can’t recover. And now that we have TV shows involved, the risk of failure looms twice as large. That’s why when one of these shows ends (and theoretically the films as well, but, uh, we’re still a ways away from box office receipts actually reflecting audience enjoyment), we gotta ask if it got the job done. So, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: success or failure?

I mean—success, obviously. No need to hide this inevitable conclusion behind paragraphs of analysis. The show was clearly a success on the whole, even if the finale was divisive. And just a general comment: literally every single TV finale in history is divisive. A show having a divisive finale just means it had a finale. Coming up with a conclusion that will satisfy everyone is absolutely impossible, and the fact that people react to divisive finales as if final episodes are somehow easy to make and usually beloved is absolute nonsense. WandaVision had a divisive finale, The Mandalorian Season 2 had a divisive finale—this is not a problem that’s unique to just The American Bird and Emo Veteran.

While I do think that Falcon and Winter Soldier’s success is pretty clear, the way it attained that success feels completely different from the success that its predecessor—Wandavision—enjoyed. The inherent nature of each series led to two drastically different receptions. WandaVision, with its unprecedented premise and mysterious nature, begged for fans to become obsessed for the two months it dominated the pop cultural conversation. Falcon and Winter Soldier, however, was a pretty straightforward action series, told linearly and with very few mysteries. “Who is the Power Broker?” is nothing compared to “Is WandaVision introducing mutants and why is Vision alive and was that a Full House reference but who is Agnes and why are witches but if that’s true then the commercials are—?” Each show’s structure was a unique experience as well, with WandaVision unfolding in a clear, episodic nature. It was nine parts that added up to a whole season. TFATWS, however, was very much a six-hour movie, which left certain entire episodes—the premiere and penultimate chapters—wholly devoted to the parts of movies where you just might get up to take a bathroom break. Falcon and Winter Soldier was maybe the show for Disney to experiment with dropping a whole season at once, or at least more than one episode a week.

Falcon and Winter Soldier’s recognizable genre and straightforward storytelling changed the way audiences responded to it, too. Whereas WandaVision essentially asked viewers to become full-time residents of Westview as they obsessed over clues or celebrated the dozens of memes and mash-ups, TFATWS was more of a “watch it when you get to it on Friday, or Saturday” kinda vibe. In short: there wasn’t a spike in boat repair search traffic after the series premiere.

That’s not a knock against the series, it just means it’s a different kind of show. It was still an important show, though, and it tackled a lot of issues that, quite frankly, I don’t think anyone expected Disney to address. While it took a while for some people to realize that WandaVision was about grief and trauma (how that wasn’t clear to everyone from the beginning, I don’t know), Falcon and Winter Soldier started by dealing with low-key racism (that bank loan scene) and moved on to tackling full-blown racism, misogynoir, police profiling, the Tuskegee experiments, and the ruthless military-industrial complex… among other things. Hard to make memes out of those moments—and that might be why the by comparison innocuous “dancing Zemo” became a whole thing.

But just because people weren’t turning every moment into a meme doesn’t mean they weren’t watching. A lot of people tuned in to see what Falcon and Winter Soldier was saying. Okay—a lot of them were tuning in to see some of the most intense action scenes we’ve seen in the MCU (De-Cap-itation America, for example). But they still watched a show that asked tough questions. It didn’t always ask them in the best way and your take on the answers is truly “your mileage may vary,” but the show didn’t back down from much. And, again, a lot of people watched. Disney proudly proclaimed that The Falcon and the Winter Soldier had the biggest premiere in the streaming service’s history—beating WandaVision and The Mandalorian. Of course in the streaming era, hard viewership numbers are as difficult to pin down as Zemo’s motives. But it’s not difficult to imagine that it’s true, especially since The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was most likely able to build on the increasing subscriber numbers that well-received seasons of Mandalorian and WandaVision pulled in at the end of 2020 and start of 2021, respectively. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier could be Disney+’s biggest series to date simply because it aired in front of the platform’s biggest user base to date.

Even though Twitter wasn’t fully obsessed with this show — though it did trend most Friday mornings — it still had a weekly presence in the pop culture conversation. And while we don’t know how many people watched it, it’s not farfetched to assume that a whole lot of people did—and that Google search traffic being way down is due to TFATWS being a pretty straightforward show, with relatively few mysteries to solve.

The clearest sign that this show was a success, though, comes from Marvel Studios and Disney themselves: the companies announced that a fourth Captain America film is in development on the day the finale dropped, and Falcon head writer Malcolm Spellman and series writer Dalan Musson are behind it. This story ain’t over.

Even if it didn’t have a feature film followup in the works, TFATWS fundamentally changed the MCU on a much larger scale than WandaVision. We have a new Captain America, a U.S. Agent working for a new mysterious faction run by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and a new—surprise—master manipulator in Sharon Carter. Joaquin Torres is poised to become a new Falcon, and Zemo’s where he needs to be if Marvel’s gonna announce a Thunderbolts show or movie. We even met another Young Avenger in Eli Bradley, grandson of Isaiah Bradley. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s impact will be felt for a long time—and that’s a pretty solid metric for success.

Stream The Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney+