The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Opens as Most-Watched Series Premiere Ever on Disney+

Marvel Studios original series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier opened as the most-watched series premiere ever on Disney+, the streaming service announced on Monday. Spinning out of the events of Avengers: Endgame and reuniting Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and James 'Bucky' Barnes (Sebastian Stan), the March 19 series premiere joins the debut episode of Marvel's first live-action series, WandaVision, and the Season 2 premiere of Star Wars series The Mandalorian as the three most-watched Disney+ Original series opening weekends to-date, according to a press release.

"New World Order," scripted by series creator Malcolm Spellman and directed by Kari Skogland, ranked as the most-watched series premiere ever on Disney+ during opening weekend (Friday, March 19 — Sunday, March 22), and the most-watched title overall for those same three days on a global basis, including international markets with Disney+ Hotstar.

The streaming service launched in November 2019 with original titles like the premiere episode of The Mandalorian, the first live-action Star Wars series, the premiere episode of Disney Channel's High School Musical franchise spin-off High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, and documentary series like Marvel's Hero Project, The Imagineering Story, and The World According to Jeff Goldblum.

Six months after an aged Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) retires the mantle and star-spangled shield of Captain America in Endgame, the high-flying Falcon (Mackie) and the metal-armed former Winter Soldier (Stan) join forces on a global adventure determining who will wield the shield — which the United States government handed to its new Captain America (Wyatt Russell) to end the series premiere.

"I hope people take away from the show that we did not mess up the Marvel brand. This could have went really wrong and we could have been the first bad Marvel show, and we're not," Mackie, a veteran of the Marvel Cinematic Universe since 2014's Captain America: The Winter Soldier, said during a Thursday virtual launch event hosted by Marvel. "We kept it going!"

Daniel Brühl, who returns to the MCU as Zemo after debuting as the Marvel Comics villain in 2016's Captain America: Civil War, added franchise fans have "six mind-boggling, super-charged hours ahead of you packed with cinematic action pieces, but also with unseen and fantastic character pieces."

New episodes of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier premiere Fridays on Disney+.

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