The Arcane and Fear Street Release Style

[Winter]

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.

[hammerofglass]

To me personally the weekly version is great if and only if I have friends watching the same show. Gives time for some fangirling about the latest episode, trying to guess what's going to come next, all that fun stuff. Otherwise its just annoying. If I wanted to be beholden to a viewing schedule someone else set I'd be watching cable.

[thisithis]

That whole weekly viewing of Arcane more or less really came from 1993's Exosquad's first season. Yeah, was a Saturday morning cartoon on syndication, and Arcane was on Netflix with three shows for the next three weeks. Yes, Arcane is clearly a better written, not to say Exosquad handsome phenomenally good writing mostly in the Second season. Since Arcane was produced by Riot Games the same guy that made League of legends, for a ton of reasons I don't want to get into right now. Arcane only took small stuff from Exosquad's first season and not from season two like a three-story arc and naming a certain individual Marcus. If you saw sfdebris review of Exosquad we all know what happens to Captain Marcus. But Arcane Marcus who I also think is a Captain, well you see watching Arcane. But if I had it my way I would get sfdebris to review Arcane. I'm just shocked no one has got him to do that yet.

[Thebestoftherest]

DC when it had DC universe released like three episodes a week which isn't a bad compromise.

[hammerofglass]

Sandman pretended to dump it all at once and then snuck another episode in two weeks later. Don't even know what to call that release style.

[Thebestoftherest]

Comic style