Already approaching the halfway point of its first season, ‘Agatha, who else?’ has been revealed as a very pleasant surprise that has gone beyond being a simple spin-off from what is still the best series to come out of the MCU today, ‘Wandavision’. It has acquired its own personality and is dazzling everyone and everyone with its intelligent script, its charismatic performers and, according to those responsible, something else.
According to Variety, ‘Agatha’ holds a curious record: it is the “least expensive” series of all those Marvel has produced. This is stated by Brad Winderbaum, head of streaming, television and animation at Marvel Studios. And not because there have been cuts in the house, but “by design,” as Winderbraum states. The good thing is that this decision brings unexpected advantages.
Winderbaum tells Variety that “we want to make these series at a responsible cost.” And he concludes: “Frankly, we have a little more creative freedom when we can make series with a reasonable budget. Like ‘Agatha, who else?’, for example: the series has a minimum of computer effects, but much less than we had done before. Most of them are practical effects, and I think that shows in the series.”
There has certainly been a turn in the investment: if Winderbaum is not exaggerating and this is the cheapest Marvel series to date, it will be below ‘Echo’, the cheapest to this point, which had a budget of 40 million for five episodes. If ‘Agatha’ has cost less than that amount, it is a notable decrease compared to the first MCU series, which featured the stars of the films (‘Wandavision’ itself, ‘Falcon and the Winter Soldier’, ‘Hawkeye’, ‘Loki’…) and a budget to match, around 150 million per series.
Another approach
According to Winderbaum, it’s not just a matter of whether there are stars or not (he states that the planned Vision series will once again feature Paul Bettany), but also the savings in effects: “I think it’s about how effects are used, as opposed to scale. And here we are responding to our own recent history, and how effective effects really are in increasing the value of a story.” ‘Agatha’ also inaugurates the Marvel Television label, a kind of full stop for the MCU series where, to begin with, it is stated that they will not require as much prior knowledge of the films to enjoy them.
Without a doubt, it remains to be seen if this new approach to ‘Agatha’ catches on: at the moment its audience figures are lower than those of ‘The Acolyte’, which was cancelled, but of course, it costs a minimal part of what that one cost. If we accept the purely creative result, the truth is that the change is noticeable in not letting all the weight fall on the effects. There is much more careful work than in other Marvel series – more showy but much duller – in sections such as the scenery, costumes, performances or dialogues.
The other day we were talking about how ‘Agatha’ worked wonderfully as it ran as an almost autonomous product, linked to a previous series, yes, but with an adventure with its own characters and its own tone. But here is the second part: that tone, that personality is carved by taking care more aspects than trusting that a green screen will save any ballot. In the end, it turns out that for series to work, the secret was doing them well.
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