Disney Movies Are Failing, Can Iger Save Them?

Earlier this month, Disney CEO Bob Iger was appearing on ABC’s Good Morning America when he made a surprise announcement. Iger told the world that Disney Animation Studios was already working on Frozen 4 long before Frozen 3 was released. The announcement surprised everyone, including the stars of Frozen, Idina Menzel and Kristen Bell.

But this announcement wasn’t all it seemed. Disney and Marvel had just released the films with the lowest opening weekend at the box office in the history of the collaboration between the two studios. The Marvels (2023) opened with less than $47 million and then dropped 79 percent at the box office in its second weekend. It was a complete failure for the Walt Disney Company at a time when it only seemed to be producing losses.

Bob Iger’s plan was simple. He didn’t like what people said, so he changed the conversation. But what Iger can’t change is that lately, the release of a Disney movie doesn’t have the same cache and box office success that it had in the past. Disney Animation, Pixar, Marvel, and even LucasFilms have not produced the way it has since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

So, how did we get to this point with Disney movies, and what can Iger and Company do to bring the Walt Disney Company back to the top of the entertainment world?

How Did We Get Here?

This isn’t necessarily the first time Disney Studios has fallen into a rut. During the World War II years, Walt Disney turned the studio’s attention to government films. After the war, it took Disney a few years to ramp back up, and the 1940s ended up being lean years for the company in terms of commercial output. But then came the 50s, and Disney went back to dominating with films like Cinderella (1950), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), and Sleeping Beauty (1959). 

But then Walt Disney died in 1966, and the studio went into a prolonged slump that took them nearly two decades to escape. It would take the tenure of CEO Michael Eisner to eventually fix Disney Animation Studios, starting with The Little Mermaid (1989). By the time Bob Iger took over as CEO, Disney was an entertainment giant again, and Iger only supercharged the company with the acquisitions of Pixar, LucasFilms, and Marvel Studios.

In February 2020, Iger stepped down and handed the reins to Bob Chapek. And that’s when our story jumps off the rails again. Chapek prioritized the growth of Disney Plus over the quality of theatrical releases, and for a while, his strategy worked. And then came Covid. In defense of Chapek, and this will be the only defense of him, no one had a plan for how to deal with a complete shutdown of the country. But Chapek did have Disney Plus to reach the consumer still.

The strategy of funneling everything to Disney Plus overloaded the consumer. With so many shows and movies, it just got to be too much. And there was also the problem of releasing films directly to Disney Plus, which in some ways trained the consumer to wait for them to arrive on the streaming platform rather than heading to theaters to see them.

To put this into perspective, Disney Studios may have had its best year in 2019. Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and LucasFilm produced eight billion dollar films, including Frozen 2, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Avengers: Endgame, Captain Marvel, and the live-action versions of Aladdin and The Lion King. Iger left as a king.

Since 2019, Disney has only released one billion-dollar film, a collaboration with Sony on Spiderman No Way Home (2021). Disney has watched as its rivals, Universal and Warner Brothers, had massive hits this year with Barbie (2023) and The Super Mario Bros Movie (2023). 

So, what is Disney missing, and what has gone wrong with its recent releases?

What’s Gone Wrong Recently?

The Bob Chapek era at Disney is best defined by two films in 2022. Disney lost nearly $200 million on Strange World (2022) and another $100 million on Pixar’s Lightyear (2022). Critics and audiences both panned these two films, and along with Disney’s fight with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, they opened Disney up to conservative’s favorite saying about the company, “Go woke, go broke.”

Disney attempted, albeit ever so slightly, to include LGBTQ+ representation in Strange World and Lightyear. Is that why they failed? Probably not at all. It was a blink-and-you-‘ll-miss-it type of moment. More likely, it was because bad reviews and word of mouth kept the audiences away.

These two bombs led to the end of the Chapek era at the Walt Disney Company and the return of Bob Iger as CEO. Iger set about undoing nearly everything his predecessor did, including changes to parking, the meal plan, and Park Hopper at Walt Disney World. But some of the decisions that Chapek made during his tenure could not be undone with the flick of a wand. Movies and television shows were already in production, and that train could not be stopped, which has led to some of the issues Disney is facing in 2023.

Bob Iger will have to explain how Disney spent $1 billion on four flops in six months of this year. It started in February with the release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. According to Forbes, the film cost nearly $200 million, which did not include post-production costs and marketing, and only made $476 million. Disney followed that up with the live-action Little Mermaid (2023), which cost the studio $265 million and only made $564 million.

The third film in the trilogy of Failures was Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023), which cost the studio nearly $300 million and only made $358 million. Finally, Disney and Marvel sunk $211 million into Marvel’s Secret Invasion for Disney Plus. There’s no telling how many people specifically signed up for the streaming service because of this one show, but it couldn’t have been that many.

Those three films and one television show cost Disney over $1 billion. And that was only the first six months of the year. The final numbers aren’t in yet, but Disney is expected to lose hundreds of millions on Haunted Mansion (2023) and The Marvels (2023). With 2023 seemingly a washout for Disney, how can they possibly fix this mess?

How Can Iger Fix This?

Doug Creutz, analyst at TD Cowen, told Yahoo Finance:

I don’t think the studio is going to be an engine that’s going to help Disney grow for the next 18 months. I don’t think it’s going to get worse, but I don’t think it’s going to get better either. here was a lot of FOMO where it’s like, ‘Man, if I miss this Marvel movie then I’m going to miss something important. The thing with FOMO is if they ask on people gets too big, they won’t go see it, Marvel has asked a lot of audiences and they’ve done it at a time when the quality hasn’t been there because they’ve been trying to do too many different things. So here we are. [Disney] now has to try and fix what it broke

Disney CEO Bob Iger took the first steps to try to fix this problem by delaying some of Disney’s upcoming releases. He delayed Deadpool 3, Captain America: Brave New World, Mufasa: The Lion King, and the live-action Snow White, which has several problems of its own. With these delays, only one Marvel movie will be released in 2024.

But these delays had more to do with the actor’s strike than with the quality of movies that would be coming out. Iger still relies heavily on live-action remakes and sequels to properties that Disney already owns. Iger has plans for sequels to Zootopia (2016), Toy Story (1995), and the aforementioned Frozen sequels. Disney has also planned live-action remakes of nearly every cartoon it ever made, including Moana (2016), Tangled (2010), Princess and the Frog (2009), Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997), and Frozen. 

 

It makes one wonder if Disney learned anything from its recent failures. The success of Barbenheimer should have taught Disney that audiences are looking for something new and exciting rather than nostalgia. And now, Disney is putting its hopes on Wish (2023), which, by all accounts, relies heavily on nostalgia. 

It should be clear that if Disney doesn’t make any changes, it won’t be finding success any time soon. But why not keep throwing out the same story if it’s worked this long, even if audiences have moved on? It’s safe, and no one has to go out on a limb. But the only way to be successful is to take chances. It’s what made Disney great in the first place. Soon enough, we’ll see if Bob Iger lets his creative take those chances. They may fail, or they may bring us the next Disney classic.

We will continue to update this story at Disney Fanatic.