Marvel executives and employees are blaming The Walt Disney Company for its recent film and TV failures.
An exposé in The Wall Street Journal claims that Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige is putting the blame on Bob Iger and executives at Marvel’s parent company, The Walt Disney Company, for the studios recent failures. Specifically, Feige is blaming Disney for forcing them to churn out as much content as possible for its Disney+ streaming service.
According to the report, Feige believes all of this content overwhelmed and alienated viewers. Furthermore, the team was allegedly “stretched” and this diluted “the quality of their output.”
It even claims that Feige agreed to the plan “because of a zealousness to tell more stories and a desire to be an ‘excellent corporate citizen.’”
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As for the studio being stretched, it claims that Feige was the final decision maker for each Disney+ show the studio was creating and that he would overturn weeks of work with little to no time to implement the changes before the show needed to meet its deadlines. The report even claims staffers chased him down in the hallways in order to get answers.
To this point, Secret Invasion director Ali Selim informed Insider back in 2023 that his show was being cobbled together in the editing room as they were releasing new episodes every week. He was asked, “From what other Marvel directors and actors have said, sometimes things in the scripts change at the last minute or the day of filming. What was your experience like for Secret Invasion? How closely did it follow all the scripts and how much room was there for improvisation or adjustments?”
He responded, “I don’t wanna play semantic games, but I think of it as an evolution. As you hunt down story, everything is constantly evolving. And it’s a fascinating process. I guess there are moments of improv, like between Sam and Don, between Sam and Ben. There are really rich moments of improv. There are actors who rely more on the script.”
“And I think as we are editing, we’re still finding the story,” he continued. “We were finding the story on episode six up until episode one had already aired. That’s part of the beauty of it, is that Marvel just keeps hunting it down and using the resources they have to come up with the best story possible, and that quest never ends.”
Disney CEO Bob Iger also previously spun this narrative during a New York Times DealBook Summit interview. He said, “In our particularly case and specifically about some of those films, they were not as good, not as high in quality as some of their predecessors, our films, and as they should have been, particularly in this environment.”
He explained, “Well, The Marvels was shot during Covid. There wasn’t as much supervision on the set, so to speak, where we have executives there really looking over what’s being done day after day after day. And that was a result of mostly of Covid, but at the same time we increased our output tremendously to feed the streaming platforms. Too much, by the way. Definite mistake.”
“Quality needs attention to deliver quality,” Iger continued. “It doesn’t happen by accident and quantity in our case diluted quality and Marvel suffered greatly from that. So there are different reasons. And I’m the first, I’ve been very public about it and I would say right now my number one priority is to help the studio turn around creatively.”
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The Wall Street Journal report then trotted out the tired fatigue narrative, and randomly cited a 23-year-old social media manager named Leslie Rodriguez, who said, “I loved it for so many years, but after all the TV shows and everything, it just started getting a little confusing and all over the place.”
It continued stating, “Employees talked regularly about ‘Marvel fatigue.’ They worried they had created a ‘no new fans club,’ in which people unfamiliar with the state of the MCU couldn’t watch a new release because they’d have no idea what was going on.”
However, as pop culture critic Gary Buechler the host of Nerdrotic says, “And that’s the spin: there’s just too much stuff, which is utter bulls**t.”
“Being kind, if a little over half of Disney Marvel stuff over the last few years had been pretty good, we wouldn’t be talking about a hard reset again. And now they’re going back to the arsonist to put out the fire, Kevin Feige.”
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This narrative is not something new at The Walt Disney Company, they trotted this out with Lucasfilm and Star Wars following the significant declines and negative audience reactions to the Disney Star Wars trilogy and specifically to the box office bomb that was Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter in 2018, Iger said, “I made the timing decision, and as I look back, I think the mistake that I made — I take the blame — was a little too much, too fast. You can expect some slowdown, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to make films. J.J. [Abrams] is busy making [Episode] IX. We have creative entities, including [Game of Thrones creators David] Benioff and [D.B.] Weiss, who are developing sagas of their own, which we haven’t been specific about. And we are just at the point where we’re going to start making decisions about what comes next after J.J.’s. But I think we’re going to be a little bit more careful about volume and timing. And the buck stops here on that.”
Fast forward to 2023 and Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy was asked what her major hope was for Star Wars following the announcement of the Rey film. She told IGN, “It’s as I said, I think quality is always everything. We want to tell resonating stories that really speak to what Star Wars is.”
“I don’t really want it and none of us want it to become like everything else,” she concluded. “We want it to be something that continues to live up to the expectation that fans have. And that’s the most important to all of us.”
As I wrote in 2023, a company that is actually producing high quality products would never come out and say such things. Their product speaks for itself, and they are bragging about how good it is. Instead, Kennedy is out here implying the quality of their product is quite poor. This is a tacit or maybe even subconscious admission that under her leadership she knows the company has produced extremely poor quality films and TV shows.
What do you make of this report that sees Marvel placing the blame on Disney?
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Translation: "If we take more time on our woke crap, people will want the crap more."
Please go bankrupt Disney. Maybe someone will buy up the rights to these properties and start producing something good for a change. Disney never will be able to do that.