Why has The Marvels only made $187,860,809 million at the box office? Disney’s CEO appears to have not one, but two solid answers for that.
Speaking at the DealBook Summit in New York this week (via NBC News), where he was interviewed by financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin, Bob Iger claimed that one of the reasons why The Marvels wasn’t up to standards was because it was shot during a pandemic.
Apparently, important people, namely, executives, couldn’t show up to steer the production in the right direction due to what was going on at the time:
He said the project was shot during the Covid pandemic and “there wasn’t as much supervision on the set … where we have executives there really looking over what’s being done.”
Iger also shared his belief that The Marvels failed because Disney has been releasing way too many superhero shows on its streaming service, many of which apparently aren’t great, driving that so-called idea of “superhero fatigue” even further:
“Quality needs attention. … It doesn’t happen by accident. Quantity, in our case, diluted quality,” Iger said.
“I would say, right now, my No. 1 priority is to help the studio turn around creatively,” he added, implying that Disney will now be all about quality vs quantity.
Some of Disney’s other recent disappointments include Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny ($383,963,057 worldwide) and Wish ($50,684,574 worldwide), the computer-animated musical film from Disney Animation, but Iger had no real excuses for those, according to NBC News.
Here’s an official description for The Marvels, which stars Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, and Samuel L. Jackson, who’s back as Nick Jury:
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.