An early warning sign that Ahsoka may meet the same fate as Secret Invasion, at least in one key aspect, has been raised thanks to a leak related to the former’s episode runtimes.
As we previously reported, a post on X (formerly Twitter) by reliable scooper @Cryptic4KQual reveals that episode 3 of the forthcoming Star Wars show on Disney Plus has a significant drop off in its runtime from the first two episodes. While episode 1 was reported to be 54:21, and episode 2 is running at 42:15, episode 3 is much shorter, at 34:50.
We’ve seen a pattern similar to this in Disney Plus’ history with one of its most critically-hated shows in recent memory, Marvel’s Secret Invasion. Although its overall brief runtime was arguably the least of Secret Invasion‘s problems, it is notable how the Marvel shows on Disney Plus seem to be having increasingly diminishing returns in that department. In fact, we took the time to rank all of the Marvel Disney Plus shows by runtime and discovered they have generally gotten shorter and shorter with each new release, with a few exceptions here and there.
Pathetically, Secret Invasion is ranked close to the bottom, second only to the 15-minute runtime of I Am Groot. Indeed, Secret Invasion‘s 3 hours and 43 minutes pales in comparison to the very first Disney Plus Marvel show, WandaVision‘s 4 hours and 30 minutes. This speaks to a larger issue with Disney Plus series, in general, in that they often feel like drawn-out movies rather than justifying their own existence as a show.
We haven’t done the numbers on the Star Wars series’ total runtime rank list, though we may make one in the future. However, it is arguably true that many of them have received similar criticism in the sense that shows like The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi feel like drawn-out stand-alone movies that have some filler episodes in between. With that said, we can’t say with confidence that Star Wars is succumbing to the exact same problem for a couple of different reasons.
For one thing, last year’s critically-acclaimed Andor had episode lengths that routinely rose above the 50-minute mark, even late into its hefty 12-episode first-season run. What’s more, Ahsoka has eight episodes total for its first season, as reported by ScreenRant, which is two more than Secret Invasion. So there’s definitely a chance Ahsoka will offer a satisfying series with a generous overall runtime, while still not feeling like filler episodes are peppered throughout to give the illusion we are not simply watching what could have been a movie.
This issue with stringing viewers along while not actually providing substantial content for its brief runtime is not just a problem with Disney Plus, but arguably with streaming services in general. You see, there has been a paradigm shift in acceptable runtimes, in general, when audiences migrated from traditional TV to streaming over the past couple of decades. Case in point: it used to be commonplace for seasons of TV shows to have 22 episodes each time, whether those were half-hour sitcoms or hour-long dramas on networks like Fox and ABC. But more and more, those days seem to be in the rearview. The trade-off is, the production values per episode for shows have arguably increased in the age of streaming — as Secret Invasion‘s $200 million budget can attest — but the runtimes are now taking a hit.
With that said, we will all have to collectively hold our breath to see if Ahsoka can stick the landing and give us another gem like Andor — or be an underwhelming mess like Secret Invasion — when the first two episodes of the Rosario Dawson-starring series comes to Disney Plus on August 23.