Disney CEO Bob Iger is holding up “Thunderbolts” as the golden child of Marvel's new "less is more" strategy—finally admitting that maybe flooding Disney+ with endless spinoffs about third-string superheroes wasn't the masterstroke they thought it was.
On a call with Wall Street analysts, Iger tried to frame the company’s surprisingly decent Q2 results as a win for his vision: fewer projects, fewer forgettable characters, and fewer flops. Since reassuming the CEO role in late 2022, Iger has been on a mission to declutter Marvel’s chaotic content conveyor belt, which had been churning out so many series and sequels that even die-hard fans started asking, “Wait, who is this supposed to be?”
In our zeal to flood our streaming platform with more content, we turned to all of our creative engines, including Marvel, and had them produce a lot more […] We’ve also learned over time that quantity does not necessarily beget quality. Frankly, we’ve all admitted to ourselves that we lost a little focus by making too much. By consolidating a bit and having Marvel focus much more on their films, we believe it will result in better quality. I think the first and best example of that is “Thunderbolts.”
“Thunderbolts” hauled in $74M at the domestic box office over the weekend—not exactly record-breaking, but the media isn’t calling it a flop either. The real shocker? Audiences and critics actually liked the film. Compared to recent Marvel releases that felt more like contractual obligations than cinematic events, this one sparked decent reviews and audience goodwill.
A few days ago, in a classic bit of Marvel marketing sleight, Disney dropped a post-opening twist by retitling the film “The New Avengers.”The Thunderbolts squad will now be crashing the next Avengers party in 2026, so buckle up for what will likely be more interconnected chaos.
While James L. Brooks teased last year that "we'll soon be seeing" Jack Nicholson, 89, act again, and that he was "reading scripts," that idea has now been shut down by his close friend Michael Douglas, 82.