Iger was specifically referring to Disney+, which he got very honest about on the call. “We all know that in our zeal to flood our streaming platform with more content, that we turned to all of our creative engines, including Marvel, and had them produce a lot more,” he said. “And frankly, we’ve all admitted to ourselves that we lost a little focus by making too much, and… by consolidating a bit and having Marvel focus much more on their films, we believe that will result in better quality.”
When Iger says the company learned this lesson “over time,” he really means it. Back in 2023, he lamented the fact that Marvel shows were generally pretty lousy, saying that the studio “had not been in the TV business at any significant level. Not only did they increase their movie output, but they ended up making a number of television series, and frankly, it diluted focus and attention.” The next spring, he laid out an actual plan: “We’re slowly going to decrease volume and go to probably about two TV series a year instead of what had become four, and reduce our film output from maybe four a year to two or at the maximum three.”
Now, many months since he first acknowledged that there might be something wrong with the company’s beloved infinite growth model, the changes are actually bearing fruit. “I think the first and best example is Thunderbolts*. I feel very good about that,” he said on today’s call. While he didn’t get the name of his own movie right, he is correct that whatever you want to call it feels like a breath of fresh air for the MCU. The film has been praised by critics and has already brought in $166 million worldwide, per Box Office Mojo.
Disney’s current slate is also “as strong as any slate” Iger has seen “in a long time.” It’s mostly sequels—this year will see new Tron, Zootopia, Avatar, Toy Story, and Avengers films—but at least the company is presumably headed in the right direction. With all those remakes chilling on the shelf for the foreseeable future, we may see some actual quality in the happiest place on Earth after all.
