Have Hollywood studios blown it with the streaming glut? They can’t say they weren’t warned

Walt Disney’s CEO Robert Iger says the studio ‘lost focus’ by concentrating on its Disney+ content. Can the blockbuster movie ever recover?

Should Marvel and Star Wars fans be starting to get worried that the Disney mea culpas are coming quicker and faster? It was only in February that the mouse house’s CEO, Bob Iger, told shareholders that the mega-studio needed to get “better at curating” franchise content for Star Wars and Marvel because of the extraordinary expense of creating it. Now, in the middle of the company’s worst box office slump in years, Iger this week told CNBC that Disney would be both “spending less on what we make, and making less” in the years to come.

It’s a response to movies such as Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Pixar’s Elemental and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny all struggling to put bums on seats for various reasons. Each of these films falls under the Disney mantle via its various sub-studios (Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm), as the company has hoovered up so many of its rivals in recent years. That all creates fabulous material for Disney+, but also means there’s an ever-expanding need for more and more movies and interconnected TV shows to keep all the sofa-bound, slavering content-hounds happy.