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In November, Disney CEO Bob Iger blamed The Marvels bombing at the box office on a lack of executive oversight and the restrictions of making a movie during a pandemic. “The Marvels was shot during COVID,” Iger said during a panel at The New York Times‘ DealBook Summit. “There wasn’t as much supervision on the set, so to speak, where we have executives [that are] really looking over what’s being done day after day after day.”
Disney shifts theatrical focus after box office bombs
After Disney’s centennial was marred by a string of underperformers (Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Little Mermaid), flops (Haunted Mansion, The Creator), and bombs (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Marvels), Iger said that the company would move forward with a greater focus on quality over quantity.
“I’ve talked about [Disney’s box office performance] a lot recently, because in assessing some of our performance, recently, one of the reasons I believe it’s fallen off a bit is that we were making too much. I think when it comes to creativity, quality is critical, of course, and quantity in many ways can destroy quality. Storytelling, obviously, is the core of what we do as a company,” Iger said during a Disney town hall in November. “I spent the year with the team fixing a lot of things. But I feel that we’ve just emerged from a period of a lot of fixing to one of building again — and I can tell you, building is a lot more fun than fixing.”
What is The Marvels about?
In The Marvels, Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel has reclaimed her identity from the tyrannical Kree and taken revenge on the Supreme Intelligence. But unintended consequences see Carol shouldering the burden of a destabilized universe. When her duties send her to an anomalous wormhole linked to a Kree revolutionary, her powers become entangled with that of Jersey City super-fan Kamala Khan, aka Ms. Marvel, and Carol’s estranged niece, now S.A.B.E.R. astronaut Captain Monica Rambeau. Together, this unlikely trio must team up and learn to work in concert to save the universe as “The Marvels.”
