- Disney’s Bob Iger believes multiple Marvel TV shows may have negatively impacted box office performance of Marvel movies.
- 2019 was the last year Marvel Studios films crossed the $1 billion mark at the box office.
- Iger is stepping down after a successful 15-year tenure that saw the company flourish under his leadership.
It appears that Disney’s former CEO, Bob Iger, has a theory on why recent Marvel movies haven’t been as successful at the box office as they once were. During an interview, he expressed that the flood of Marvel TV shows might have hurt the performance of Marvel movies in cinemas.
Marvel Studios, now a significant player in the entertainment industry, experienced a glass ceiling in 2019 when its films stopped crossing the $1 billion mark at the box office since then. Besides the COVID-19 pandemic obstructing cinema halls, Iger thinks that oversaturation due to multiple TV series from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) had a role to play in the declining performance of Marvel films.
While discussing his 15-year tenure as the CEO of The Walt Disney Company, Iger, who took the company to new heights including acquiring Marvel, Pixar, and Lucasfilm, claimed that the proliferation of MCU content might have caused a decline in the novelty and uniqueness of the superhero genre. According to him, “When you have as many Marvel series as there are, it’s a lot. It’s hard to keep track even for me to keep track of them all.”
Nonetheless, Marvel isn’t inclined to reduce its production of TV series anytime soon, as the upcoming slate of Marvel TV shows such as “Moon Knight” and “Secret Invasion” is set to keep adding to the current library. As Iger nears the end of his successful corporate journey, it remains to be seen how his successor, Bob Chapek, will handle the delicate balance between Marvel features and television projects.
Despite Iger’s speculation, no empirical evidence exists to support the notion that the increase in TV content has directly affected moviegoers’ appetite for Marvel films. The future success of MCU movies will likely depend on the quality of their productions and the stories they opt to tell, rather than the volume of television content produced.