Disney CEO Pushes Back Against Idea Of Superhero Fatigue

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/di.../1100-6521612/

Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger has pushed back against the idea of "superhero fatigue" being to blame for some of the company's newest Marvel movies coming up short at the box office. Instead, Iger acknowledged that the company's movies simply weren't good enough to get people to spend money to go watch them in a theater.

"A lot of people think it's audience fatigue; it's not audience fatigue. They want great films. And if you build it great, they will come and there are countless examples of that," he said at a Morgan Stanley speaking event this week (via THR). "Some are ours and some are others. Oppenheimer is a perfect example of that. Just a fantastic film."

Iger went on to say that he believes Disney's ability to "focus" and make fewer, better movies and TV shows will make all the difference. "We reduced the output of Marvel, both number of films they make, and the number of TV shows, and that really becomes critical, but I feel good about the team," he said.

In 2024, Disney has just one Marvel movie coming--Deadpool & Wolverine. This is a marked change from previous years where Disney released multiple MCU films per year.

In an effort to improve quality, Iger said Disney is looking at "every part" of the filmmaking process, including the cast, director, and script. "I personally watch films three to five times with the team and just create a culture of excellence and respect which is really important with the creative community," he said.

With regard to quality, Iger said Disney has already quietly canceled some "projects" that "we just didn't feel were strong enough." He did not name these outright, however.

"You have to kill things you no longer believe in, and that's not easy in this business, because either you've gotten started, you have some sunk costs, or it's a relationship with either your employees or with the creative community," Iger said. "It's not an easy thing, but you got to make those tough calls."

Some of Marvel's movies in 2023 that did not exactly light up the box office included Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania ($476 million) and The Marvels ($206 million). Those movies made hundreds of millions of dollars, but didn't reach the heights of many other MCU films. The biggest Marvel movie in 2023 was Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, which made $845 million.

Disney is also slowing the pace on Star Wars theatrical releases, as the next film, The Mandalorian & Grogu, isn't coming until 2026.

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It's a reasonable position. I think some fatigue for the genre is inevitable and undeniable, but if you forced me to pick, I'd say the drop in quality/relentless pace of production is the primarily culprit for the waning interest, and inherent fatigue is a more marginal contributor.

The formula is simple: take whatever made these characters & stories great in the first place (great enough to be known world or nation-wide by multiple generations) and capitalize on those aspects when retelling the stories on the big screen.

But here's a hint: things that never made these characters, their supporting casts or their stories great are race, gender or orientation swaps, or flagrantly altering the origins, histories, backgrounds of the characters or their story's essential plot points in order to pander to various demographics, or to put a movie-makers "personal" touch on the stories (as in the proverbial mustache on the Mona Lisa) so as to make them virtually unrecognizable or offensively changed from the source material.

I agree with the first paragraph, but it seemingly conflicts with the second: swapping race/gender/orientation doesn't make something better, but it's usually not what made the original character great, either. 95% of the time all three are more or less immaterial to the characters. Which, to the frustration of all sides of the culture, means both that swapping them is kind of lazy and pandering, but also doesn't usually violate anything important about the character, either.

I think the causality is not that changing origins or demographics makes something bad, but that when someone doesn't have a lot to say, they're more likely to fall back on that sort of superficial thing to seem as if they do. Which is why I think superficial changes correlate with this lower quality, but are not directly caused by it.

You don't have to get into race panic to understand why the bubble finally burst on superhero films. The biggest mystery to me is how they sustained such a completely inert model, that just kept cranking the same thing out time and time again with very little stylistic variation, as viable for as many years as they did.


Just hire creative people with ideas to make movies, you dumb shits. Even if they are just crap superhero movies your are committed to keep making, the less you interfere with the creative process, and simply let the directors try and do something that is their own, the more you can sustain this boring ass genre.

I guess this suggests two possible reasons. One is a general superhero fatigue and the other is that Disney just doesn't do them well. Considering whose statement it is, he has to blame the genre.

That said, I know that I've been superhero used up for a while now, Disney or not.

Disney and WB absolutely BOTH deserved to take a hit at the box-office for two of their 2023 superhero movies, both of which had their commercial prospects badly damaged by the actors strike. And last year's strikes would have ended much quicker if the studios hadn't stonewalled on some very reasonable demands.

That aside, the creativity gap between the studios is positively breathtaking. Hint: look at which studio had already opted for a full reboot of its comic-book universe even before it saw nearly all of their 2023 releases bomb.

Bingo! I think super hero movies in limited numbers could have an audience for years to come. But the studios' insistence on displaying social justice and wokeness is not what most of the public wants to see.

If they want to lecture the public on accepted group-think, then they should stick to smaller art films.

Can you give some specific examples of things you consider fall under this umbrella term?

The average person who is not in an echo-chamber isn’t going to notice any real/unreal agenda without someone fabricating it for them. Let’s boil Kill Bill down to its essence. Where my bros, Chads and dads at?

That leaves us back at square one. The internet is to blame for the decline of everything and movies too.

They have no choice given high ticket prices, international markets, and high production and marketing costs. That is, make more long spectacles with fantasy elements.

The universe they built was all leading towards a specific story arc. That meant that films were viewed less like standalone pieces and more like episodes of a saga, which also softens up any potential critique on any one film.
Once that story arc concluded many casual viewers lost interest, especially because it meant investing a lot more years and familiarizing yourself with new and lesser-known characters. The latter is not normally bad, but the appeal these films have to a large chunk of their viewers is an existing familiarity with the protagonists.

This also sounds like a pretty legit reason why interest is finally flatlining.


You know, more so than some of these other reasons being listed.

How anyone can blame 'wokeness', when the same year Barbie made a billion dollars, is beyond me.


The problem Disney is having is simple: they spend $200+ million dollars on budgets for bad movies. Bad scripts, boring plots, and concepts that didn't excite anybody.


The problem with the superhero movies specifically is that they rushed to make so much content that EVERY idea got used. Instead of 'narrow these 10 scripts/ideas down to 2', they said 'thanks for the 10 ideas, now go make 5 more'.

To put it another way, audience fatigue usually only hurts mediocre/bad movies.


Spiderman No Way Home, The Batman, Into the Spiderverse, Wakanda Forever, and Guardians of the the Galaxy 3 all did quite well.

It's amazing how quickly people have forgotten that there was a major pandemic that shut down theaters for months and which has also led to what may eventually be regarded as a permanent shift in moviegoer behavior.

This is especially true with the studios that have their own streaming operations (basically, all of them except Sony).

In 2019, there were 9 or 10 movies making over a billion dollars worldwide. In that business environment, making movies that cost $200m was a perfectly rational business decision, given the likelihood that they could eventually go on to be quite profitable from theatrical alone.

In the last few years, there's only been 1 or 2 of those each year. So while occasionally a movie may make "big bucks", there's going to be a lot more movies that people still want to see - just not in the theaters as soon as they open theatrically.

The total box-office numbers are still quite a bit down from what they were before the pandemic - the industry hasn't recuperated completely, and last year's strikes also meant a lot of movies have had to be postponed from 2024 to 2025. So this year's total BO figures are expected to be down from last year - let alone what they were pre-pandemic.

But he didn't he blamed Disney, that's the whole point. He said they didn't make good movies and that's why people stopped seeing them.

Don't you see why the CEO of Disney can't simply come out and include WB movies in describing what is going on? That would be a rookie mistake, and he's certainly not a rookie.

Don't worry, they'll also blame wokeness for the success of that movie too.


It's a term that doesn't actually mean anything anymore (and it barely did to begin with). It's just something old cranks say whenever something happens they don't agree with. Or when society dares to change in anyway to accomodate anyone that isn't them. Or if any minority group makes a complaint that they feel excluded from society by a lack of representation (and just to prove how important representation actually is, just listen to these anti woke obsessives freak the **** out when they suddenly have less representation than all of the representation they were used to...it seems to matter a whole lot to them, doesn't it? But how dare anyone else ask for it)


Mostly though it's just for those who would rather just keep screaming out a word instead of formulating a coherent argument. I imagine half of the time they don't really even know what they're talking about either.

At least part of this is that the genre lends itself to big budget monstrosities and if big $$$ receipts don't come in the first weekend, everybody is jumping out windows. Accountants and statisticians will tell the company that X% of all receipts come in within 12 hours of the opening and it that doesn't happen, it's panic time. My recollection goes back to recent but pre-plague years in which people lined up around the block at my local movie palace to see the latest Batman or whatever. They counted tickets and declared the movie to be a winner by the next morning.

I the past few years, the same kind of movie, same theater, has 25% of the seats filled on opening night and no line except for beers. It might be a better proposition to run the theater as a bar.

One of the obvious conclusions you might make about this is that budgets are just unrealistically huge for a time of meager ticket sales. A million dollar movie that makes 20 million is a success, but a 200 million dollar movie that makes 100 million has people jumping out of windows. A lot of people who finance these things just see it as an investment. Art is irrelevant. It seems to be time for a reckoning about the cost/profit equation in movies.