Like a politician realizing just how close he was to courting disaster in an otherwise successful election, embattled Disney CEO Bob Iger certainly appears to be saying all the right things at the moment.
After winning an ugly and public proxy battle over control of the Walt Disney Company board of directors, Iger has been on the offensive, doing his best to assuage any concerns about his company's ugly and public issues, especially the ones stemming from a disastrous 2023.
The latest example of this potential hot air from Iger comes out of Disney's second quarter 2024 earnings call, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
"I’ve been working hard with the studio to reduce output and focus more on quality, that’s particularly true with Marvel," Iger said.
“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 at the maximum three,” Iger added, THR reported. “And we’re working hard on what that path is, we’ve got a couple of good films in ’25 and then we’re heading to more Avengers, which we’re extremely excited about.”
Now, on its face, that's a commendable statement and sentiment from a House of Mouse that fans have begun to describe as a "soulless machine" of late.
Anyone -- fan, creator, consumer, artist -- can appreciate a quality-over-quantity approach, especially when it comes to storytelling.
And if any company could use a prolonged break from the over-saturated superhero genre that it helped popularize, it's Disney.
Could you imagine the current appetite for a Marvel film if there hadn't been any superhero films since 2019's objectively well-done saga capstone, "Avengers: Endgame"?
Instead, Disney and Marvel fed into a very real and very festering sense of "superhero fatigue," leading largely to the current state of affairs when it comes to the genre as a whole. The company did that by force-feeding audiences superhero film after superhero film, most of them to dwindling critical and commercial success.
So again, Iger is correct in his latest assessment. If anything, it would be nice to see no more than one TV series and two films a year, at max. Two series and three films still feels a bit much, but it's better than the current trajectory.
But what's the old saying about fool me once?
If you'll recall, back when Iger first won that proxy battle, he again made all of the "right" statements.
“I’ve been preaching this for a long time at the company before I left and since I came back then our number one goal is to entertain,” Iger said in an interview, shortly after winning the proxy battle in early April, according to THR. “The bottom line is that infusing messaging as a sort of a number one priority in our films and TV shows is not what we’re up to."
Again, not "infusing" far-left activism into entertainment is a swell thought.
It just hasn't happened since Iger made those remarks. Between examples of thoughtless gender swapping and taking down the patriarchy, it's evident that Disney and Marvel are as insistent on infusing messaging as they've ever been.
Will Disney suits really be able to resist the siren call of mass-producing content to goose the bottom line on some financial ledger?
Recent history (and Disney's overall treatment of the equally languishing "Star Wars" brand) suggests, "No."
And if that turns out to be the case, you'd be hard-pressed to find any Disney fans willing to be made a fool of thrice.
