SPOILER ALERT: This will include references to some aspects of the She-Hulk Season One finale. I recommend you watch it!
Okay, we all good now?
Ask any advertising executive what the key to creating quality branded content is, and they’ll list off versions of three basic requirements: It needs to attract attention, not interrupt it. It needs to be authentic to who that brand is. And it needs to actually be entertaining.
Since the launch of Disney+ in 2019, Marvel Studios has used the streaming service as a marketing vehicle for its content through such behind-the-scenes shows as Marvel Studios: Assembled, and its ongoing One Shot series that complement its broader properties. But this week, in the Season One finale for She-Hulk, Marvel Studios itself made a surprising and hilarious debut into its own Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it might just be the best branded content of the year.
Deep into this ninth episode of the season, we see She-Hulk not only break the fourth wall and speak to the audience—as she has done all season—but actually bring us back to the Disney+ menu screen, break through that, and jump into Assembled in order to infiltrate Marvel Studios itself to confront the show’s writers room and studio head Kevin Feige (in the form of an AI-powered robot) over the predictable direction that the episode’s climax was taking up to that point.
(Full disclosure: When the show first took us back to the Disney+ menu, yes, I actually thought I was sitting on the remote . . . again.)
She-Hulk then storms into the actual Marvel Studios reception area and is asked by the company’s IRL receptionist to sign a nondisclosure agreement before heading in—a process that show writer Cody Ziglar (who appears in the episode) told the X-Ray Vision podcast is very real. Marvel Studios honcho Feige, here in the form of K.E.V.I.N. (Knowledge Enhanced Visual Interconnectivity Nexus), asks She-Hulk to transform back to human form Jennifer Walters because it’s cheaper for the studio that way, and, as he says the visual-effects team has moved on to another project, we hear a not-so-subtle audio cue for the upcoming film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
