(Headline USA) As Disney’s latest movies continue to crash and burn at the box office due to backlash over the company’s woke virtue-signaling and pandering to identity politics, CEO Bob Iger blamed the abysmal performances on the COVID-19 pandemic.
One of Disney’s latest busts was The Marvels, which it spent $274.8 million to make.
The film is officially the lowest-grossing installment in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, according to Variety, bringing in only $80 million in ticket sales in North America and $197 million globally.
Disney itself admitted on Sunday that it will stop “weekend reporting of international/global grosses on this title.”
Iger gave his reasons for why he believed The Marvels, in particular was a disaster during the New York Times Dealbook Summit last week.
“‘The Marvels’ was shot during COVID,” Iger said, according to Deadline. “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.”
That much is apparent to any moviegoer who saw the previews featuring an uninspired mishmash of multicultural girl power with an otherwise flimsy premise and a discernible lack of star power.
Iger also blamed streaming services for the other Disney movie flops.
“The experience of accessing [the films] and watching them in the home is better than it ever was,” he said. “And [it’s] a bargain when you think about it. Streaming Disney+ you can get for $7 a month. That’s a lot cheaper than taking your whole family to a film. So, I think the bar is now raised in terms of quality about what gets people out of their homes, into movie theaters.”
According to its November earnings report, Disney’s streaming service lost $387 million in the final quarter of fiscal year 2023, which was actually a considerable improvement over its $1.4 billion loss in Q4 of 2022, Variety reported.
Despite the red flags that emerged in a recent shareholder report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Iger did not attribute the films’ poor numbers to Disney’s embrace of wokeness.
In the SEC filing, it appeared to acknowledge that its leftist agenda has had significant impacts on its financial outlook but gave no indication that it planned to reverse course creatively.
“We face risks relating to misalignment with public and consumer tastes and preferences for entertainment, travel and consumer products, which impact demand for our entertainment offerings and products and the profitability of any of our businesses,” said the filing.
Iger did offer an opaque statement during a companywide “town hall” last week that he hoped to start “building again” but offered few details considering the company’s ongoing financial crisis.
After diving nose-first into a culture-war conflict with Gov. Ron DeSantis over Florida’s anti-grooming laws—the controversy that spurred the resignation of ex-CEO Bob Chapek and the return of Iger—Disney may have stumbled into another conservative boycott for pulling its ads on Twitter.
The company, along with Apple and other woke corporations, joined the George Soros-backed Media Matters in a smear campaign accusing billionaire Elon Musk of anti-Semitism after Musk, ironically, suggested that nominally Jewish open-borders activists like Soros may have helped welcome anti-Semites into the U.S. and other Western nations.
After the companies pulled their advertising, Musk told Iger and others to “go f**k yourself.”
Conservative influencers such as ZeroHedge have since issued a renewed called for boycotts of the boycotters.
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Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
