Eight days after she attended the Oscars as producer of the nominated film “Argentina, 1985,” Victoria Alonso was abruptly let go as Marvel’s president of physical production, post-production, VFX and animation according to Variety.
In the wake of that news earlier this week, the trade has done an in-depth story exploring the surprise shakeup and numerous questions raised by it as the cause of her termination is unclear.
Sources for the trade say the decision was made by a consortium including Disney Entertainment Co-Chairman Alan Bergman to whom all of Marvel Studios reports.
Alonso’s longtime boss and Marvel CCO Kevin Feige was reportedly not involved in the process and ultimately did not intervene. Alonso joined Marvel Studios in 2006 and has been a fixture alongside Feige and co-president Louis D’Esposito up until this week.
Numerous sources for the trade indicate Marvel has been under tremendous pressure over the past few years – the company has pushed out seven movies, eight streaming series and two TV specials in a span of just under two years.
Alonso worked to get all of that through Marvel’s post-production process and last Summer the strain on the studio began to show as visual effects artists took to the Internet to loudly complain about the studio’s demanding work schedules.
A lot of the complaints basically came down to Marvel not providing clear enough guidelines and decisively figuring out what they wanted beforehand.
Then came the release of “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” with rampant complaints about its visual effects. That film ended up with $463 million global box-office haul and will likely struggle to break even in its theatrical window.
This has understandably led to a slowdown of the Marvel rollout as the trade indicates five works for Disney+ were originally planned for this year – that list has now been narrowed down to three or four, with the others moving to 2024 – taking at least some of the pressure off of Marvel’s post-production pipeline.
Alonso’s replacement has not yet been announced by Disney, and head over to Variety for the full story.
