A new feature piece over at The Wrap has gone into Disney’s aggressive streaming expansion and what that has done to their marquee franchises like Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars in recent years.
During “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” promotion last month, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige was fairly candid about how the company’s demand for more Marvel content to feed the Disney+ service led to the MCU brand being devalued.
He said: “It was just too much. It was a big company push. And it doesn’t take too much to push us to go. There was a mandate that we were put in the middle of.”
The result was a decided lack of public interest in the far busier fourth and fifth phases of the MCU. One unnamed producer tells the outlet: “Given the quality of the Marvel Disney+ output has been incredibly mediocre, it’s dragged the entire brand down and diluted its creative. People don’t care now.”
Another marketing executive says: “When you went to a Star Wars movie, it used to be special. But there’s a difference between let’s have a movie every four years versus let’s have three shows on the air all the time and have a movie every year.”
Lucasfilm has visibly pulled back on “Star Wars” glut with only one TV season currently in production (“Ahsoka” Season 2) and nothing scheduled beyond that, bar some theatrical release movies.
“MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios” co-author Dave Gonzales says: “I do think that it has eroded the branding. All of the sub-brands have been eroded… Marvel remade how they made franchise movies, but they thought they could do the same thing with television – you can’t. They think they’re more nimble than they actually are.”
Of all its labels, Walt Disney Studios and Disney Animation have mainly remained unaffected because those haven’t been as heavily pushed as the others on the service.
