Hollywood and Bob Iger Need To Stop Blaming COVID For Everything

There has been a trend in Hollywood, with people like Disney CEO Bob Iger blaming failures in their business on the COVID-19 pandemic. While that excuse was legitimate back in 2020, and even 2021, it’s not the main reason anymore. So, file this under Op-Ed because I have thoughts.

The pandemic did change people’s movie-watching behaviors, but the studio’s reaction to the pandemic was to blame for that. Studios put their films on VOD or on streaming services during the shutdowns, and now people are not going out to the theater anymore unless it’s for something they really want to see. They will wait for the film to go to a streaming service because it’s easier and cheaper.

In fact, “When will Wish be on Disney+” was trending as soon as the film opened. This indicated that customers were likely going to wait for streaming.

People went to the movie theaters for films like “Avatar: The Way of Water,” “Barbie,” “Oppenheimer,” and “Super Mario Bros.” The issue isn’t so much COVID as you have to give your audience something they want to see.

Recently, Disney CEO Bob Iger was at the The New York Times’ DealBook Summit and used COVID as an excuse for why “The Marvels” failed at the box office. This time he argued that due to the pandemic, the director of the film Nia DaCosta, didn’t have the oversight she should have had, saying “The Marvels was shot during COVID. 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.”

First of all, the film’s release date had been pushed back about five times.

While the pandemic may have initially been an issue, in the time since, they had no supervision for the film? There were also supposed weeks of reshoots. Why wasn’t there supervision then?

Disney fired the team on “Daredevil Born Again” and is basically starting over again because it wasn’t done right, but they let a tent pole film fail because it was filmed during COVID, but a Disney+ show will start over and be reworked at a big expense.

Again, “The Marvels” release date was pushed back a few times. The release was moved out of the pandemic, and they still couldn’t have oversight to fix it?

Secondly, what about the other failed films in the last couple of years?

Did they not have oversight as well? “Lightyear” and “Strange World” both failed, as did “Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania,” “The Haunted Mansion,” “The Eternals,” “Wish,” and even “successes” like “The Little Mermaid” probably didn’t even break even. Where was the supervision for those films? What is the excuse for those failures? Many were filmed after COVID.

I argue that Disney is not giving their customers what they want, and/or people are just now willing to wait for streaming. The days of FOMO over not seeing the last Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, or Pixar film are over. People will wait, especially if it isn’t something they feel they have to see.

Both of those reasons are the fault of Hollywood and people like Bob Iger. No matter how much he wants to “pass the buck,” many of the failed projects were greenlit when he was at the Walt Disney Company. Decisions for who would direct or lead were established then as well. Several of these recent box office bombs were simply pushed back due to the pandemic not caused by it.

Blaming everything on COVID is getting a bit tiresome, and people aren’t buying it anymore.

But this is my opinion.

What do you think? Comment and let us know!