Five and a half hours of chairs gave Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday casting livestream nearly 300 million eyeballs.
There’s clearly a reason why Marvel is so successful, and we’re left here scrimping for coffee, trying to point people towards independent and lower budget productions.
The huge livestream of chairs that Marvel put together earlier this week, running for just shy of five and a half hours, turned into the kind of numbers success that virtually guarantees it’ll be repeated.
According to calculations, the stream was viewed 275 million times while it was taking place. Even accepting that some people were ducking in and out to admire the furniture, that’s the kind of audience that a movie trailer struggles to get. As a flexing of its marketing muscles, too, it’s proof that Marvel can still wrestle the limelight and get it pointed brightly in its direction.
I do maintain that the event has been something of an audit of how movies are reported on. I know of people who work in this industry who were directed away from covering other material to sit and comment on the ongoing livestream. I’m also aware that this site has attracted criticism for our coverage of the event. We’ve been criticised more for our coverage of a muti-billion dollar franchise than perhaps anything we’ve done before.
Read more: Avengers: Doomsday | Marvel’s five-hour chair video was a mind-numbing show of arrogance
My position remains the same. Marvel at its best is brilliant. But current movie entertainment reporting feels like it’s never been so narrow. Edicts from up high demand that writers who have bills to pay have little choice but to give up the bulk of their working day to cover one film with a bigger promotional budget than any other movie set to be released in 2026 (and 2027). Meanwhile, you get a film like The Order, which in any other era would be a talked about mainstream film, shunted to the sidelines.
Still, what do I know? Marvel’s plan worked, and you can see a breakdown of the numbers here.
It’s been an odd week in entertainment reporting. There’s a 23-year old being thrown under the bus seemingly by a major studio, and a collection of chairs hogging the limelight. Let’s see what next week brings.
In the meantime, I still think the $1m-grossing Hundreds Of Beavers is great.
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