Critics Like ‘WandaVision’ Better Than ‘The Mandalorian,’ Audiences Don’t

WandaVision is the highest profile Disney Plus series released since The Mandalorian, at least across the “adult” focused Marvel and Star Wars universes. COVID delays have shoved all the rest of the series further down the pipeline, but it’s interesting to start to compare the two biggest offerings to date.

So far, while WandaVision is overall a hit with critics, it is receiving more of a tepid reception from fans who wholeheartedly embraced The Mandalorian, more or less from episode one.

Here are the side by side comparisons of the two between critic and audience ratings across a variety of sites:

The Mandalorian

Metacritic – 71 critic score, 8.5 audience score

Rotten Tomatoes – 93% critic score, 91% audience score

IMDB – 8.8/10 audience rating

WandaVision

Metacritic – 76 critic score, 6.7 audience score

Rotten Tomatoes – 94% critic score, 79% audience score

IMDB – 7.5/10 audience rating

As you can see, critics are scoring WandaVision and The Mandalorian close to identically, with WV a touch higher, while there is a significantly larger gap between audience scores in favor of the Star Wars series.

Why? I mean, if you’ve seen both shows, I think the answer is readily apparent.

WandaVision, for whatever superheroic implications it may have, is fundamentally a love letter to classic television, at least in these early episodes here. We have gone through episodes styled like programs from the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s in the first weeks here, with the ‘80s, ‘90s, ‘00s and possibly the ‘10s still to come. It stands to reason that TV critics would be more likely to appreciate that, and the eclectic performances we’re seeing from Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany and Kathryn Hahn, among others.

But for general audiences? I also get why it’s not nearly as accessible as The Mandalorian, which is a straight adventure story while WandaVision is…what, exactly? No one really seems to be sure.

If you’re completely uninitiated, you really can’t just stumble into WandaVision and appreciate what’s going on if you have no clue about the backstory of these characters or what they might be setting up in this Pleasantville-ish, unreal utopia. Meanwhile, it’s easy for even non-Star Wars fans to hop into The Mandalorian and still get on board relatively quickly.

But even if you are an MCU fan, WandaVision is still a bit of a stretch, as it’s wildly different than anything we’ve seen in that universe. There’s no action to speak of, and even if there are clearly going to be implications for the wider universe when all this is over, it’s the slowest of slow burns right now.

The people I probably see appreciating WandaVision the most are comic-readers who are at least familiar with some of the stories this is based on, House of M and Tom King’s Vision, and know where this might be headed, whether it has to do with hints about SWORD, AIM, Mephisto, Wiccan, Speed and a whole bunch of other stuff as we head toward the “multiverse” era of the MCU for the next few years.

I think WandaVision is good, but yes, Falcon and the Winter Soldier probably would have been a more “traditional” opening salvo in the new Disney Plus era of Marvel stuff rather than this experimental project. I say give it time and let its mysteries unfold. You’ll probably like it a lot more by the end, if I had to guess.

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