Disney CEO Bob Iger, who earned $31.6 million last year, has gotten specific about the number of projects Marvel will release in the future, reportedly as part of Disney’s “overall strategy to reduce output and focus on quality.” Variety says:
“We’re slowly going to decrease volume and go to probably about two TV series a year instead of what had become four and reduce our film output from maybe four a year to two, or a maximum of three,” the Disney CEO said during the company’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday. “And we’re working hard on what that path is.”
It would be nice to be optimistic about this—Marvel has seemed a bit overextended of late—but Iger has a way of tamping down any excitement a person might feel. He said, in this same call, that some of the upcoming series are “a vestige of basically a desire in the past to increase volume.” Variety notes that he is including Agatha, the Kathryn Hahn-starring WandaVision spinoff, in that.
In the broader Disney scope of things, Iger also disappointed those of us who are always hoping for more original films, saying, “We’re gonna balance sequels with originals. Specifically in animation, we had gone through a period where our original films and animation, both Disney and Pixar, were dominating. We’re now swinging back a bit to lean on sequels.”
Were not Pixar original films some of the best animated movies of the last few decades? Can you have sequels without having great original films? These questions do not arise.
