In the early days of the MCU, back when we were only getting one or two movies a year, Marvel went out of their way to give fans another extra treat by inserting specially-made short films on the home video releases of their pics. Called One-Shots, these shorts were officially part of the MCU and featured a whole host of familiar characters, including Phil Coulson, Peggy Carter, Justin Hammer and Trevor Slattery.
Despite their popularity, though, the last One-Shot was released back in 2014 and, though there has been talk of reviving the series, nothing has materialized as yet. The situation makes it sound like there’s simply no interest in producing them anymore, but it turns out that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, Disney brass have repeatedly asked the folks at Marvel to make new entries.
Marvel Studios producer Louis D’Esposito opened up about the real reason why there haven’t been any new One-Shots in a while during a chat with EW, as part of their piece on the series. He explained that it wasn’t an executive decision to stop putting them out, but just an unfortunate side effect of how busy Marvel is these days.
“We’re just so busy. 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.”
Though this is sad news for those that enjoyed the One-Shots, you can see where D’Esposito’s coming from. Nowadays, you can’t move for Marvel content. Their biggest enterprise is, of course, that the studio has ramped up their schedule to include three blockbuster movies every year. Likewise, there are currently at least 8 Marvel TV shows on the airwaves. Given that, it’s no wonder there’s no spare time to make these straight-to-DVD/Blu-ray shorts.
Like the producer says, though, maybe they’ll get around to doing them soon. Perhaps once Avengers 4 is out of the way and the MCU restarts with Phase Four?