Last month, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige talked candidly about how Disney+ has "devalued" the MCU brand. As he put it, "It was just too much. It was a big company push. And it doesn’t take too much to push us to go. There was a mandate that we were put in the middle of."
Disney wanted more content for its newly launched streaming platform, and Marvel Studios jumped at the chance to finally bring characters like Moon Knight and She-Hulk to our screens. The mandate also allowed Feige to turn the spotlight to supporting players, Loki, the Scarlet Witch, a new Captain America, and more.
Things started well, but interest has waned in both the studio's movies and TV shows. That's led to fewer ticket sales, and according to The Wrap, a loss of 700,000 subscribers for Disney+ in the first quarter of 2025.
This comes from a piece exploring what Disney's streaming expansion has done to Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar, with one producer with franchise experience telling the trade, "Given the quality of the Marvel Disney+ output has been incredibly mediocre, it’s dragged the entire brand down and diluted its creative. People don’t care now."
Another marketing executive noted, "When you went to a Star Wars movie, it used to be special. But there’s a difference between let’s have a movie every four years versus let’s have three shows on the air all the time and have a movie every year."
Lucasfilm appears to have learned from that, at least, because aside from Ahsoka season 2, there are no other Star Wars TV shows on the way (several movies, starting with The Mandalorian and Grogu, are heading to theaters, though).
Back to Marvel, and Dave Gonzales, the co-author of MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, shared, "I do think that it has eroded the branding. All of the sub-brands have been eroded. They were finally getting to do what they wanted to do – put everything in development."
"Marvel remade how they made franchise movies but they thought they could do the same thing with television – you can’t," added Gonzales. "They think they’re more nimble than they actually are." He later explained that by making TV shows like movies, series such as WandaVision were costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
Pixar has suffered most, but even with a handful of live-action Disney movies like Lady and the Tramp and Pinocchio premiering on Disney+, Walt Disney Studios and Disney Animation have remained largely unaffected. Helping matters, of course, is that those brands have not been as heavily pushed on people across Disney+ over the past six years since Disney+ launched.
Now, it's down to Disney to rehabilitate its biggest brands. As noted, that's already started with Star Wars, while Marvel Studios is attempting to do the same; Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps have faced issues at the box office, but both received positive reviews and the plan from next year is for us to get one or two TV shows a year that are largely unconnected to what's happening in theaters.
Now, we wait to see if it works or whether Disney's biggest brands have been damaged by streaming beyond repair.