The retreat is gonna be epic:
After years of Marvel and Star Wars movies and shows inundating screens big and small, Disney is putting the brakes on the output of some of its biggest franchises and brands following Bob Iger’s Feb. 8 comments that the company needs to be “better at curating” franchise content that’s “extraordinarily expensive.” Added Iger: “We want the quality on the screen, but we have to look at what they cost us.”
The Mouse was already shedding jobs and expenses, so this part is hardly new. What’s rather more important is how openly Iger’s talking about the bottom line. I suspect that LIGHTYEAR looms heavily over that particular conversation; you’d think TOY STORY-derived IP would be a stone-cold money-maker (it always has been, after all), and yet that movie didn’t get the job done*. If Disney is going to be leaning on its existing IP material for the foreseeable future, best to make sure that it can bear the weight.
Moe Lane
*I will virtuously avoid speculating as to why, having not seen the movie in question — but I’m pretty sure that the days of treating the script as the dump stat in the Disney production process have abruptly come to an end.
#commissionearned