As if the creative future of the Western entertainment industry wasn’t already looking dire enough to begin with, Disney CEO Bob Iger has announced that, in an ostensible attempt to net the company a win after a string of back-to-back-to-back-to-back losses, the foreseeable future will see the House of Mouse turning away from original works in favor of producing easily marketable sequels.
Iger provided this insight into Disney’s forward-facing cinematic strategy while speaking to investors amidst the company’s Q2 2024 earnings call, as held on May 7th.
His attention then proceeding to be diverted thanks to a smattering of unrelated questions from the call’s attendees, Iger would return to the topic of Disney’s sequel-heavy future courtesy of JPMorgan Chase analyst David Karnovsky, who following a string of discussions ranging from the company’s sports-streaming plans to the future viability of Disney Plus eventually pressed the CEO, “As you noted, your upcoming slate is a number of sequels and that’s a strategy where you’ve had a lot of success in the past, but as you look out over the medium term, how do you think about the balance of leaning on established franchises versus investment in new IP?”
In turn, the embattled Disney boss asserted, “We’re going to balance sequels with originals, particularly in animation.”
“We had gone through a period where our original films in animation, both Disney and Pixar, were dominating,” explained Iger. “We’re now swinging back a bit to lean on sequels. And so we’ve talked, as you know, about Toy Story [5] and obviously Inside Out [2] this summer.”
“I just think that right now, given the competition in the overall movie marketplace that actually there’s a lot of value in the sequels obviously because they’re known and it takes less in terms of marketing,” he continued. “In terms of Marvel specifically, it implies there too, we actually have both. Thunderbolts for instance, is coming up in 2025 as an original. And then, of course, we mentioned Deadpool this summer, which is a sequel and I talked about Avengers and Captain America is coming out in 2025.”
“It will be — it will just be a balance,” Iger ultimately concluded, “which we think is right.”
Notably, Iger’s claim that Disney has begun to merely turn to “lean on sequels” is, simply put, a massive, massive understatement.
Of the 28 upcoming films from across their various studios that Disney has both officially titled and given release dates to only eight – The Beach Boys, Jim Henson Idea Man (both of which are documentaries), Young Woman and the Sea, Kinds of Kindness, A Real Pain, Nightbitch, The Amateur, and Elio – can be classified as ‘original films’.
From there, of the remaining 19 titles, a whopping 15 are prequels/sequels – Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine, Alien: Romulus, Moana 2, Mufasa: The Lion King, Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts*, Tron: Ares, Zootopia 2, Avatar 3, Avengers 5, The Mandalorian & Grogu, Toy Story 5, Avengers: Secret Wars, and Avatar 4.
Meanwhile, two of them, the live-action Snow White and Moana films, are remakes, and thus fall under the general umbrella of ‘not an original work’.
As for the last two – The Fantastic Four and Blade – it should be noted that they exist in a sort of ‘grey’ area regarding the labels of ‘original work’ and ‘sequel’, as while they both do exist as sequential entries in the overall MCU, neither film explicitly ‘jumps off’ from any previous franchise production.
Thus, in the interest of fairness, the two should be considered outliers in the conversation until the final cuts of the film are presented to the public.
(Notably, while Thunderbolts* follows a new team and story, it picks up plot threads left dangling in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Black Widow, thus qualifying is as more of a sequel than an original work.)
All in all, at a time when audiences are clamoring for more new and original stories to engage with rather than being shovel-fed Hollywood’s hamfisted attempts to capitalize on nostalgia and IP, the House of Mouse has confirmed that they are not the studio to look towards for genuine creativity.
Ah well, there’s always anime, right? Oh, wait.