Disney announced big layoffs earlier this week, reporting that roughly 1,000 employees across the company had just had their jobs eliminated. While the cuts were company-wide, reports from Forbes suggested that one of the biggest branches hit was Marvel Studios, which lost staffers across the board—but which suffered especially harsh cuts to its famed visual development team. (I.e., the Kevin Feige-assembled crew responsible for designing the overall look of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.) Almost the entire department was reportedly eliminated in the new cuts, which came as new CEO Josh D’Amaro took over his position in the wake of the Second Leaving of Disney corporate messiah Bob Iger. Today, Polygon has a new report diving a bit deeper into what the visual development team did that was such a big deal, as well as probing some anonymous sources as to why it might have been targeted for skeleton-crew-ification.
For the unfamiliar, visual development was one of Feige’s big ideas for making sure the Marvel movies had a cohesive look: The dozen-plus artists on the team were typically the first ones to take a crack at characters being introduced to the MCU, before passing them off to the staffs working on individual films. That included designing looks, costumes, and even specific shots for movies—often inspired by their collective love of the original Marvel Comics. (One anonymous visual development staffer who’s quoted in the Polygon piece—and who pushes pretty hard on the idea that individual departments were not always wild about having this kind of vision imposed on them from above—noted that visual development’s goals were often counter to the instincts of film industry folks who “try and run away from” the look of the original comics.) Besides creating some of the films’ most iconic visuals—the big “Avengers Assemble” pose shot from near the end of The Avengers apparently had its start as a piece of visual development concept art—the group was also responsible for making sure MCU films were able to slot together in a way where no one character looked just wildly out of place with the rest when the inevitable (and lucrative) crossovers occurred.
As to why the department was cut, there are a few different theories levied, ranging from studio politics to worries about AI bleeding into the workflow. (One staffer claims, without naming names, that individual Marvel film teams are already using AI to develop visuals for their movies—even if nothing generated has made it into any final shots.) The most plausible answer, though, is one of the most prosaic and depressing: Disney just doesn’t want to have that many full-time artists on staff any more, and would rather lay these people off and then hire them back as freelancers on a film-by-film basis. (The report notes that visual development was expanded as a standalone department when Marvel was making its big push into TV a few years back; the pivot away from that development probably didn’t help their case.) Given the timelines these movies film under—and how early visual development was involved in planning for new films—it’ll probably be at least a few years before the effects of the cuts will filter into theaters. But it’ll be interesting to see if Marvel can hold to its own visual language without the team that helped to craft it being immediately on hand.
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