Disney Makes Too Many Bad Movies, CEO Bob Iger Admits

in Disney, Movies

Disney CEO Bob Iger against collage of various films

Credit: Disney, edited by ITM

Controversial Disney CEO Bob Iger has finally said it: the Walt Disney Company has been making too many bad movies.

Bob Iger presenting at the D23 Expo 2019
Credit: Nagi Usano, Flickr

It has been just over a year since Bob Iger returned from a very brief retirement, during which his successor, Bob Chapek, presided over the beginnings of a still-ongoing feud with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and a series of box office flops for Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm.

Chapek cannot be entirely blamed for the changing fortunes of the Walt Disney Company, however. The COVID-19 pandemic hurt any number of huge corporations around the world, and, to be fair, he was picking up exactly where Bob Iger had left things.

Bob Chapek and Bob Iger in front of a shower head
Credit: Inside the Magic

Even more importantly, there has been a growing perception that Disney and its various studios (particularly Marvel Studios) have simply been cramming too many projects into theaters and the Disney+ streaming service, with many of the projects disappointing fans or simply being bad due to rushed schedules or budgets.

Related: RIP Disney Channel: CEO Bob Iger To Get Rid of Beloved TV Network

The Star Wars franchise has been accused of producing a growing number of Disney+ series that increasingly require deep knowledge of Dave Filoni’s TV shows in order to follow, while so-called “Marvel fatigue” has been battling the perception that any new release basically requires homework in order to understand what’s happening since the first Iron Man (2008). That’s not even bringing up the indifference that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny faced when it hit theaters.

Still from Dial of Destiny
Credit: Lucasfilm

Pixar chief Pete Docter has openly admitted that the studio’s recent releases have not struck the same chord as classics like Toy Story (1995) and The Incredibles (2004), while Disney is being criticized for relying on live-action remakes like The Lion King (2019) and The Little Mermaid. At the same time, original films, like Wish, are badly underperforming in theaters.

So what’s the problem? According to Disney CEO Bob Iger, the Walt Disney Company has been too obsessed with making a lot of movies and television shows, regardless of their quality, instead of actually making good ones.

In a recent town hall meeting with Disney employees (per Deadline), Bob Iger admitted that in “assessing some of our performance, recently, one of the reasons I believe it’s fallen off a bit is that we were making too much.”

Star, Valentino, and Asha from Disney's Wish
Credit: Disney

Related: Marvel Star Speaks Out Against Bob Iger, Blames Disney CEO for MCU Failure

He continued, “I think when it comes to creativity, quality is critical, of course, and quantity in many ways can destroy quality. Storytelling, obviously, is the core of what we do as a company.”

It is not difficult to read between the lines that the Disney CEO understands that the various Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Disney Animation releases simply are not at the same level as they have been in previous years, and that if the Walt Disney Company is to get back on track, it needs to focus on quality instead of quantity of bad movies.

The Walt Disney Company is at a crucial point in its history, and Bob Iger is, at the very least, starting to admit that things need to change. We’ll have to see what the Disney CEO does about it.

Do you think Disney can ever produce the same kind of classics it once did? Let us know your opinions in the comments below!

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