The Walt Disney Company has found itself in some hot water with even its most devoted fans recently. Current company backlash includes Bob Iger’s out-of-touch comments about the entertainment strikes, creative decisions made on the new live-action adaptation of Snow White, and lackluster reviews of various Disney Plus projects. The director of the most recent Marvel Studios streaming series suggests “rabid” fans should lower their expectations around Disney’s content quality.
Marvel’s Secret Invasion is the latest Disney entertainment offering to garner mixed and ultimately disappointed reviews from excited fans. The series director, Ali Selim, basically blamed the negative response on fans’ high expectations. Here’s what he told Variety:
I don’t feel bad about mixed reviews. If you had unanimously good reviews, every movie would gross $10 billion, trillion dollars, right? [Projects] resonate with different people at different times for different reasons, and Marvel has a very devoted — even rabid — fan base who have expectations and when their expectations aren’t fulfilled, they move in the other direction; they give it a thumbs down.
He then questions, “Is it our job to fulfill their expectations?”
For many Disney and Marvel fans, the answer is…yes. The Walt Disney Company has set a certain standard for its content quality, and that is what customers loyal to the brand spend their hard-earned money on. If you want to make audiences happy, keep them speaking highly of your projects, and ultimately give you money, then you don’t ask them to lower their standards to make room for your mediocre content.
Selim is seemingly suggesting that Disney Plus subscribers pay the same amount for lower-quality content and praise it as if it was as good as the content that hooked them in the first place. This is while Disney Plus plans on price hikes and a supposed limit on the number of devices logged into one account.
Bob Iger mentioned a cutback on Marvel and Star Wars content, which will perhaps help with quality control, but Selim’s comments seem to highlight what may be going wrong with Disney’s current entertainment model.