Marvel Executive Brad Winderbaum Explains How Disney+ Led to the Studio’s Struggles
While 2023 was clearly a difficult year for Marvel Studios, both at the box office and on streaming, it was also the year that Marvel decided to make a change.
After years of dominating popular culture, Marvel seemed to hit a wall last year with the box office failures of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels and the poor reception Secret Invasion got on streaming.
Disney+ Is to Blame
While much has been made of “superhero fatigue” and the end of Marvel’s cultural dominance, according to Marvel’s head of streaming, television, and animation, Brad Winderbaum, Marvel’s problems boiled down to one single change.
“Frankly, in all honesty, there was a mandate to kind of create as much as we could for Disney+, as quickly as we could,” he said.
Marvel’s overproduction and lack of quality control have long been acknowledged by executives at the studio and even Disney CEO Bob Iger.
In order to get Marvel back on track, Iger mandated that the studio slow down its release schedule.
“And then there was a shift,” Winderbaum continued. “And all of a sudden, we have to start spreading our release dates out. So, that really accounts for a lot of the delays. Now, we’re using that time. We’re not sitting idle.”
“So, it’s like it stays in the oven. You can bake certain things a little more. It’s actually, I think, ultimately, it’s only going to make things better. But, most of it is just frankly shrapnel from the business.”
Marvel Will Develop More Than It Produces
In addition to spreading out its releases, Marvel is also leaning into more traditional television making for its streaming series.
Instead of creating shows that are essentially movies broken up into six parts, the studio plans to create more anthology series, utilize showrunners, and create characters that can be enjoyed without necessarily keeping up with the broader MCU.
According to Widnerbaum, the other change at Marvel is that the studio will now begin developing more projects than actually see the light of day. While that practice is commonplace in Hollywood, it has not traditionally been how Marvel operates.
“We’re more like a traditional studio now. We’re developing more than we actually will produce,” Winderbaum continued. He
Proof of Marvel’s new strategy can be seen in the fact that for the rest of 2024, the only live-action projects on the release schedule are Deadpool & Wolverine and the WandaVision spin-off Agatha.
Hopefully, with a little more time to get their feet under them, Marvel will be positioning itself for years to come.