Disney Wants Marvel Studios To Do More One-Shots

Do you remember Marvel One-Shots, those little short films that used to be attached to the home video releases of Marvel Cinematic Universe films?

Well, Disney does — and they want to see more of them just as much as you do.

Apparently, planning three movies a year — including a two-part, five-hour, mega-epic superhero team-up — is taxing on their attention spans, though, and Marvel simply has not had time to do as many as they would like.

That’s according to producer Louis D’Esposito, who directed some of the One-Shots, during an interview in support of tonight’s newest Marvel release, Avengers: Infinity War.

The comment comes as part of an interesting oral history of the One-Shots, five-minute short films create by in-house Marvel Studios talent and originally aimed at creating buzz around minor characters who might one day become major ones.

The one-shot program helped bring both Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD and Marvel’s Agent Carter to life, so it would be difficult to overstate their impact in bringing the Marvel Cinematic Universe to television — a move that did not seem like as safe a bet at the time as it does now.

Asked whether getting award-winning actor Ben Kingsley to reprise his controversial role as Trevor Slattery, the “fake Mandarin” from Iron Man 3, was a challenge, D’Esposito responded no: “the most difficult thing was finding a time to do it.”

EW confirmed what many fans have suspected over the years: it is not lack of interest but an increased workload at Marvel — a studio which is massively successful but is still run by a relativley small number of permanent staff — that is responsible for the absence of One Shots.

“We’re just so busy,” D’Esposito told EW. “Disney wants us to do it, we want to do it, and I keep telling them, ‘I’ll do it on the next film,’ but I keep breaking my promise.”

It seems only fair to note that the “Team Thor” viral videos and their follow-up, a six-minute short titled “Team Darryl” and featuring Jeff Goldblum’s Grandmaster, feel like the latter-day descendants of the One-Shots, except of course that they are humorous and likely non-canonical.

Avengers: Infinity War, Marvel’s biggest film to date, is set to hit theaters tonight, one week earlier than its original premiere date on May 4. Marvel will follow the film up with Ant-Man and the Wasp on July 6, and Captain Marvel on March 8, 2019. The sequel to Avengers: Infinity War is still without a title, and it will arrive next year on May 3.