“The Marvels” didn’t light up the box office, with its $47 million opening weekend being a record low for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While speaking at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit (via CNBC), Disney CEO Bob Iger gave a couple of reasons for why he thinks the film didn’t live up to the franchise’s lofty expectations, noting that it suffered from a lack of oversight while it was in production.
“The Marvels was shot during COVID,” Iger said. “There wasn’t as much supervision on the set, so to speak, where we have executives [that are] really looking over what’s being done day after day after day.”
Iger added that “The Marvels'” box office performance was a wake-up call for the studio. It’s one of the few MCU movies not to gross over $1 billion, having only raked in just over $199 million. As such, Iger believes that the studio needs to have more realistic expectations and not press ahead with developing projects, particularly sequels, for the sake of putting out regular content. Despite the setbacks, “The Marvels” still boasts an 83% fan score on Rotten Tomatoes, suggesting that many people enjoyed the superteam caper.
