Star Wars Movies And Shows Are About To Get Severely Scaled Back
As part of a company-wide cost-cutting strategy, Disney is cutting back on new content for Star Wars. According to CNBC, Disney CEO Bob Iger has admitted recently that the glut of content the company has produced for both franchises and in particular in Marvel series have had a less than positive effect. Many Disney properties, including recent Pixar offerings like Lightyear and Elemental, have underperformed, as have Marvel movies and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Iger said that, along with an increase in Star Wars series, the quantity of Marvel content has “diluted focus and attention.” Disney introduced a major initiative earlier in 2023 to cut back on $5.5 billion in expenses, with $3 billion of that number representing non-sports content creation. That means, in Iger’s words, “spending less on what we make and making less.”
But franchise fatigue is real and Star Wars nor Marvel is immune, with many seeing the quantity of productions in each franchise as an increasing liability.
Overall, cutting back on Star Wars content seems to be a wise course of action for the media giant, which acquired Lucasfilm for about $4 billion. While Marvel has been a major trendsetter in comic book films, largely dominating the market, Star Wars has also done well, making back Disney’s initial investment in six years on the strength of the final Skywalker trilogy and Rogue One.
Its streaming series have also been successful, with the pop culture phenomenon of The Mandalorian and Grogu, the so-called “Baby Yoda,” not to mention Emmy nods for Obi-Wan Kenobi and Andor.
But franchise fatigue is real and Star Wars nor Marvel is immune, with many seeing the quantity of productions in each franchise as an increasing liability. While Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 has been able to rise above, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was a big disappointment with a quick decline in sales after its first week.
The overwhelming amount of content might have made sense when everyone was staying home during the pandemic, but as people have returned to their everyday lives, the steady increase in content production has proven to be too much.
Meanwhile, the ever-increasing number of Marvel series, from Loki to She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, to Ms. Marvel and more, have contributed to the sense that Disney is throwing too much at the wall for much of it to stick.
Though the last theatrical release for Star Wars was in 2019, there have been so many series it can be hard to keep up. That kind of overwhelming amount of content might have made sense when everyone was staying home during the pandemic, but as people have returned to their everyday lives, the steady increase in content production has proven to be too much.
As Disney tries to keep its Disney+ streamer afloat through various means—including removing original content for a tax write-off—it will certainly be looking to the money it saves on fewer series and films to help.
Arguably, Star Wars and Marvel have grown too fast, along with streaming ambitions across the industry, which makes course corrections such as these both sensible and inevitable. What remains to be seen is how the ongoing WGA strike and apparently immanent SAG-AFTRA strike will affect all of Hollywood, as production after production continues to shut down.
As the effects of an industry-wide existential crisis continue to take hold in the face of AI and other challenges, Disney will probably have a lot of scaling back to do for a while anyway.
