Bob Iger Comments on Disney’s Massive Losses “I’ve Been Telling Everybody Good Isn’t Good Enough”
2023 turned out to be disastrous for Disney and for Marvel Studios. Most of their movies flopped, and TV shows were met with mixed reviews at best. Disney concluded its first year in a long time not having a billion-dollar movie, and Marvel Studios concluded the year with ‘The Marvels’ which is officially the lowest-grossing movie in the MCU, and the first movie not to break the $100 million threshold at the domestic box office.
Recently, the list of biggest box-office flops was revealed, and most of Disney movies were on it, with ‘The Marvels’ losing an eye-watering $237 million dollars on a single project. This seems like a drop in the bucket for one of the most powerful entertainment and media companies in the galaxy, but it was enough to prompt some drastic changes.
Iger has already announced that they will be drastically decreasing their creative output and in his latest investor conference appearance, he tried to explain just what the problem was.
As we got into the streaming business in a very, very aggressive way, we tried to tell too many stories. Basically we invested too much, way ahead of possible returns. It’s what led to streaming ending up as a $4 billion loss. It was clear to me that our structure was not working, because we were removing accountability from those that were basically investing the most capital was a mistake.
Iger also argued that they started pumping out to much content, and this ended up diluting quality across the board when it comes to all of their most popular franchise. MCU is not the only franchise seeing record-breaking losses, the same thing plagues both ‘Star Wars’ and classic Disney Animation, although fans would argue that Iger is not addressing the true cause of their profit losses.
There’s a very fine line that you can cross and get in trouble if your volume ends up diluting management’s attention to what is being made is right. And that’s what happened to us. So I have pulled that back. I’ve been telling everybody good isn’t good enough. It has to be great. Just keep driving that, but if you force them to make too much, then that becomes almost impossible to do.
Plenty of fans pointed out that Disney is losing revenue due to their recent comments, and move that can be perceived as driving their “core” audience away by pushing projects that no one is realistically interested in. Some recent examples are female-focused superhero movies and shows that portray men in bad light and race-swapping some important characters that were part of the brand for decades.
What do you think about it? Is it a quality problem or a social virtue-signalling problem? Let us know in the comments below!
