Disney's Very Sorry, But You'll Only Get 2 Marvel Shows a Year From Now on

True to his earlier word, Disney CEO Bob Iger is cutting back on all things Marvel, reducing the number of TV series and movies to a mere non-Hulk-sized handful. 

The news comes as part of Disney's quarterly earnings call, which Variety covered on Tuesday. Iger told reporters that the company's path forward will focus on quality over quantity, a course correction from the last several years of pumping out stories even tangentially related to the Avengers. 

“We’re slowly going to decrease volume and go to probably about two TV series a year instead of what had become four and reduce our film output from maybe four a year to two, or a maximum of three," Iger said. 

The Marvel release calendar would seem to confirm this strategy. There's only one Marvel film hitting theaters this year: Deadpool & Wolverine. On the TV side, 2024 has already seen the debut of X-Men '97, one of the more inventive plays on viewer nostalgia, albeit one that's still mired in it. The Kathryn Hahn-led Agatha, a WandaVision spin-off, is still slated for September 2024, and a new animated Spider-Man series will swing its way across the small screen later this year. 

That's three shows in 2024, we realize, but so far, the only Marvel TV series planned for 2025 are Daredevil: Born Again and Ironheart. So, it looks like the contraction happening across the industry has also come for one of its biggest players. But one of Disney's other brands emphasized the "quality over quantity" approach months ago. Back in February, at the the Television Critics Association's winter 2024 press tour, FX chairman John Landgraf finally marked the end of peak TV, and floated a new term — post-peak TV — for our usage.

Like Iger, Landgraf stated that the costs of making TV shows have increased considerably, and it's no longer tenable to churn out new titles. “The realignment of industry priorities from streaming scale at any cost to profitability continued after the strikes ended, leading to the cancellation of numerous projects and series," Landgraf noted. (But hopefully, that approach won't prevent FX from investing in series like Shōgun, a proper modern epic that put every dollar in its budget on the screen.) 

Whether this narrowing of focus actually produces high-quality storytelling is still very much up in the air. During Tuesday's earnings call, Iger touted the decision to "lean on sequels" for a bit, after ostensibly balancing animated originals with IP extensions in recent years. Superhero fatigue is real, after all — so real that at this point, we may need a new "post-peak TV"-like term for it. But marketing to existing fanbases will always be the move for corporations like Disney, which is releasing multiple new Star Wars shows this year alone, including Leslye Headland's The Acolyte and the Jude Law-starring Skeleton Crew. Star Wars series remain as hit or miss as Marvel shows, so we'll have to wait to see how this "quality over quantity" approach works out. 

Danette Chavez is the Editor-in-Chief of Primetimer and its biggest fan of puns.