In following up on his previous assurances that the House of Mouse had recognized their need “to be better at curating” their various franchises, Disney CEO Bob Iger has revealed that, going forward, the Marvel Cinematic Universe will be receiving a greatly reduced number of entries per year.
Iger spoke to Marvel Studios’ forward-facing plans while speaking to investors amidst the company’s Q2 2024 earnings call, as held on May 7th.
Asked by Mogran Stanley Analyst Ben Swinburne if he could elaborate as to how he felt regarding “the sort of [production] pipeline on the Marvel side, specifically, and whether you think that this IP is being reinvigorated to the extent you’d like it to be?”, Iger responded with the assurance, “We’ve been working hard with the studio to reduce output and focus more on quality. That’s particularly true with Marvel.”
To this end, Iger then revealed, “I know you mentioned television shows. Some of what is coming up as a vestige of basically a desire in the past to increase volume, 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 to the maximum three.”
“And we’re working hard on what that path is,” he then clarified. “We’ve got a couple of good films in 2025 and then we’re heading to more Avengers, which we’re extremely excited about. So I — and overall, I feel great about the slate. It’s something, as you know, that I’ve committed to spending more and more time on.”
“The team is, I think, one that I have tremendous confidence in,” Iger concluded. “And the IP that we’re mining, including all the sequels that we’re doing is second to none. So I feel really good about what’s coming up.”
As noted above, this scaling back of the MCU’s output comes after the public admission by Iger, as given to attendees of the company’s previous Q1 2023 earnings call, that while Disney would be moving forward by “lean[ing] more into our franchises, our core franchises, and our brands,” these franchises would also be undergoing a significant round of “curation”.
“We have to be better at curating the Disney, and the Pixar, and the Marvel, and the Star Wars of it all,” explained Iger. “And, of course, reduce costs on everything that we make. While we are extremely proud of what’s on the screen, it’s gotten to a point where it’s extraordinarily expensive. We want all the quality. We want the quality on the screen, but we have to look at what they cost us.”
Iger would later reiterate the company’s plans during a July interview with CNBC’s David Faber.
Asked by Faber, “Is there a problem though at Disney Animation? Is the loss of John Lasseter years ago been a blow that you haven’t been able to recover from?”, the CEO would reply, “Well, first of all, the studio and its movie assets are number one at the global box office so far. That said we are extremely realistic and I’m very objective about that business.”
“There have been some disappointments,” he would then admit. “We would have liked some of our more recent releases to have performed better. It’s reflective not a problem from a personnel perspective, but I think in our zeal basically grow our content significantly to serve mostly our streaming offerings we ended up taxing our people way beyond, in terms of their time and their focus, way beyond where they had been.”
Pointing to Marvel Studios specifically, Iger then posited, “Marvel’s a great example of that. They had not been in the TV business at any significant level. Not only did they increase their movie output, but they ended up making a number of television series. And frankly, it diluted focus and attention. And I think you are seeing that is more the cause than anything else.”
Later asked by Faber if these factors would prompt him to pull back on the amount of Marvel projects being released, Iger bluntly confirmed, “Yes. You pull back not just to focus, but it’s also part of our cost containment initiative, spending less. Spending less on what we make and making less.”
At current, Marvel’s 2024 output stands at just one film – the multiverse-hopping Deadpool & Wolverine, due out in theaters on July 26th.
Meanwhile, 2025 is slated to see the release of four total Marvel film projects – Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts*, The Fantastic Four, and Blade.
As for their television filmography, 2024 will reportedly host the debut of three series, with the WandaVision spin-off Agatha and the animated Eyes of Wakanda on track to follow the already-released Echo sometime later this year.
(While Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is also set to release in 2024, given it’s existence in an ‘alternate’ MCU continuity, the project is considered a canonical outlier and thus being left out of this analysis.)
Regarding 2025, only one series, Daredevil: Born Again has thus far been confirmed to debut within the year.
And though there exists the possibility that Ironheart may also see the light of day in 2025, the Dominique Thorne-led miniseries has yet to receive any official release date.
