Excess Disney Plus series hurting public interest in Marvel, says Bob Iger

Disney CEO Bob Iger has spoken about the Disney+ studio’s increased production.

While his contract has just been extended by Disney, Bob Iger spoke at the Sun Valley conference for an update on the company’s situation, reports Variety. He admitted that the studio has not always lived up to public expectations. This then had an impact on indoor results, whether for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania(which didn’t even top $500 million worldwide), or Elementary Or Indiana Jones and the Dial of Fatewhich got off to a slow start.

“There were some disappointments and we wish some of our more recent films had performed better“, said Bob Iger. “It’s not a staffing issue, but I think in our rush to grow our content significantly to primarily serve our streaming offerings, we’ve ended up stretching our audience much more than necessary in terms of time. and attention“.

“Marvel is a great example of this“, continued the boss of Disney. “He had never been present in the television business on a significant level. Not only did they increase their movie production, but they ended up producing a number of TV series, and frankly that took away from attention and concentration. I think that’s what’s causing it“.

Marvel has already considered this issue. After releasing three series in 2022, only two shows are on the program on Disney Plus this year: Secret Invasion which is being broadcast, and Echo which will be launched in November.

Regarding Pixar’s situation, Iger cited the studio’s decision to put three Pixar films on Disney+ during the pandemic: Drunk, Luke And Red alert. From, Buzz Lightyear and Elementals were released exclusively theatrically, but the former flopped and the latter performed modestly.

“There have been three Pixar movies in a row that went straight to streaming mostly because of COVID. And I think that may have created an expectation in the audience that the movies were going to stream eventually, and probably quickly, and there was no rush. And then I think you have to agree that there were also some creative hiccups“.

Last March, following the box office failure of Ant-Man and the Wasp: QuantumaniaBob Iger had already spoken to indicate that the Marvel Cinematic Universe needed “new”:

“There’s nothing inherently wrong with the Marvel brand. I think you just have to look at what characters and what stories we’re leveraging, and if you look at Marvel’s trajectory over the next five years, you’ll see a lot of new stuff. We’re going back to the Avengers franchise, but with completely different Avengers.“

The Disney board has extended Bob Iger’s contract until the end of 2026. He had been recalled at the end of 2022 to take over the position of general manager which he had given up to Bob Chapek in 2020

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