Disney cuts back on Marvel, Star Wars content

Disney It’s slowing down when it comes to making movies and TV series for Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm, CEO Bob Iger said on CNBC Thursday.

The move comes as the company looks to cut costs at a time when its recent films, from Marvel to animation, have been underwhelming at the box office.

“You’re stepping back not only to focus, but also as part of our initiative to contain costs. Spend less on what we make, and earn less,” Iger said Thursday.

Earlier this year, Disney rolled out a wide-ranging business reorganization that involved $5.5 billion in closings, of which $3 billion will be cut from content excluding sports.

Iger said Thursday that a lot of decisions have been made to support the company’s main streaming service, Disney+, and attract more customers.

While he also noted that Disney has had some missteps with Pixar animation in recent months, he called Marvel a particular example of the company’s “enthusiasm” to ramp up its original content in streaming.

“Marvel is a great example of that,” Iger said. “They weren’t in television on any significant level, and not only did they ramp up their film output, they ended up doing a number of TV series.” “Honestly, it has impaired focus and attention.”

Disney acquired Marvel for more than $4 billion in 2009, and the franchise has since racked up billions of dollars at the global box office for the company.

Earlier this year, Iger said the company needed to assess how many sequels each character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe should spur, and it was time to explore the “freshness” of the brand. He added that “there was nothing inherently wrong with the Marvel brand” at the investor conference.

Earlier this year, “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” debuted as the 31st film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, ushering in the fifth installment of the 15-year-old franchise. The film experienced the largest drop in ticket sales from its opening weekend to its second weekend in franchise history. The Marvel version also garnered mixed to negative reviews.

Meanwhile, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is much better, grossing over $800 million worldwide.

On the Lucasfilm front, there hasn’t been a Star Wars movie in theaters since 2019, and the company has focused primarily on series, like Emmy nominees “Andor” and Disney+’s “Obi-Wan Kenobi.” Lucasfilm’s “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” the fifth film in the franchise, has flopped at the box office despite its July 4th release date.

However, similar to Marvel, Lucasfilm has generated a significant amount of revenue for Disney.

The company bought Lucasfilm in 2012 for about $4 billion, and has recouped its investment in just six years after a lucrative new trilogy of films, along with standalone films like “Rogue One.”

For Disney and most of its streaming competitors, original content has only lived on its own major streaming services rather than being licensed to other platforms — a revenue engine that has held up in the traditional TV and movie business for some time.

On Thursday, Iger said it was a “potential” that could happen to Disney’s streaming content.

“That’s a possibility,” Egger said. “I wouldn’t rule it out.” Licensing was part of a set of models that shaped the traditional television business, he added, and curbing content for their own platform in the early days of broadcasting was the right move.

newly, Warner Bros. Discovery He reportedly held talks about license HBO content for other platforms, incl Netflix. The company has also removed content from its Max service and licensed it to free, ad-supported streaming platforms such as Fox Corp.

Disney also followed suit in removing content from its streaming platform.