Disney+ is making a big change to the way it releases original series

For years, Friday has been the day that most major streaming services have rolled out the new episodes or new seasons of their original shows. When a brand new season of Stranger Things or Ozark hits Netflix, it is always on a Friday. When new episodes of The Boys arrive on Amazon Prime Video, they release on Fridays. The end of the week seems like a natural fit, as viewers have the entire weekend to catch up on a new episode or binge an entire season. But Disney is shaking things up on its streaming service by moving all of its big premieres to Wednesday.

Early last month, Disney revealed in a tweet that the premiere of Marvel Studios’ Loki had been moved up from Friday, June 11th to Wednesday, June 9th. “Wednesday are the new Fridays,” Tom Hiddleston (Loki himself) said in a short video hyping up the new release date on Disney+.

The move to Wednesday appears to have been a successful one for the streamer, because starting in July, every Disney+ original series is going to start premiering on a Wednesday.

Disney shared its release schedule for July earlier this week, and every original series that was set to debut on the streaming service next month is now going to start streaming on Wednesday. Monsters at Work — a show that picks up right after the original 2001 movie — moved from July 2nd to July 7th. The live-action sequel series to Turner & Hooch has been bumped from July 16th to July 21st. And the new animated series Chip ‘N’ Dale: Park Life is shifting from July 23rd to July 28th.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, this will hold true in August as well, with Growing Up Animal and Short Circuit season 2 each releasing on a Wednesday instead of a Friday as well.

Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that the impetus for the change was the sheer volume of original content being produced for Disney+. While Netflix’s biggest shows debut on Fridays, original shows, movies, and specials drop every day of the week on the streaming service. In order to spread out its content, Disney+ will shift all of its original series to Wednesdays — including Marvel and Star Wars shows — but original movies will continue to roll out on Fridays.

Disney has yet to share any specific figures in regards to Loki’s viewership on Disney+, but as reported by Deadline, the latest statistics from Samba TV show that the first episode of the new series reached 2.5 million views in the US in five days. By comparison, the first episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier reached 1.8 million households, while WandaVision reached 1.6 million.

Providing these numbers are accurate, betting on Wednesday has already paid off, and Loki’s success might have been what pushed the company to move all of its original series.