The Arcane and Fear Street Release Style
Posted: Sat May 21, 2022 6:45 pm
This is a response to Thebestoftherest post as it's something I imminently thought of when they posted it. Arcane and Fear Street were both series released back in 2021 and both used a different release style to the standard Netflix release style. Normally Netflix releases an entire series at once which is done with the mindset that what you are watching is a 8,9 or even 10 hour movie. To my knowledge Netflix is the only streaming serves that does this and it was an interesting idea but personally I felt it got old really fast, at least with the shows that had hour long episodes.
That's not to say I think it's always a bad idea as I think shows like She-Ra and Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous have a more reasonable 5 or 6 hour runtime thanks to each episode only being 22 or 23 minutes long. But shows like the MCU series and The Witcher it feels rather clunky releasing every episode from a single season. On the flip side, going over to Disney+ I found the older style of releasing one episode a week to be strangely annoying in it's own way. I actually WANTED to get more episodes all at once instead of having to wait an entire month for a show to finish.
Arcane and Fear Street offers up an interesting compromise between the two release styles. Arcane was a standard 9 episode season with 45 minute episodes but instead of releasing the entire season over the course of a single day instead released 3 episodes once a week while Fear Street was 3 movies that were filmed together and likewise had each film released a week between each other. This, IMO, is a GREAT release style as it has all of the benefits of both the Netflix release style and the standard weekly release style of other companies.
This style gives you a more easy to digest style by giving a 2 or 3 hour watch/binge and a week between releases so we can go over our thoughts and get excited for the next part of the season. I found this release style to be so much more enjoyable then the one episode release style of Disney+ or the 10 hour binge of other Netflix shows. Again, shows like She-Ra, Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous and other shows that have 23 minute long episodes with 12 episode season worth with the standard Netflix style but shows like The Witcher, I think, would greatly benefit from this release style.
That's not to say I think it's always a bad idea as I think shows like She-Ra and Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous have a more reasonable 5 or 6 hour runtime thanks to each episode only being 22 or 23 minutes long. But shows like the MCU series and The Witcher it feels rather clunky releasing every episode from a single season. On the flip side, going over to Disney+ I found the older style of releasing one episode a week to be strangely annoying in it's own way. I actually WANTED to get more episodes all at once instead of having to wait an entire month for a show to finish.
Arcane and Fear Street offers up an interesting compromise between the two release styles. Arcane was a standard 9 episode season with 45 minute episodes but instead of releasing the entire season over the course of a single day instead released 3 episodes once a week while Fear Street was 3 movies that were filmed together and likewise had each film released a week between each other. This, IMO, is a GREAT release style as it has all of the benefits of both the Netflix release style and the standard weekly release style of other companies.
This style gives you a more easy to digest style by giving a 2 or 3 hour watch/binge and a week between releases so we can go over our thoughts and get excited for the next part of the season. I found this release style to be so much more enjoyable then the one episode release style of Disney+ or the 10 hour binge of other Netflix shows. Again, shows like She-Ra, Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous and other shows that have 23 minute long episodes with 12 episode season worth with the standard Netflix style but shows like The Witcher, I think, would greatly benefit from this release style.