Film Producer Claims Studio Executives “Don’t Believe In Superhero Fatigue,” Rather “Think The Problem Is That Their IP Isn’t Universal Enough”

Film producer Priyanka Matoo shared that studio executives believe the problem with many of their big budget superhero films is not fatigue, but rather their “IP isn’t universal enough.”

As first reported by Fandom Pulse, Matoo shared to X, “I regret to inform you that I’ve now had multiple conversations with studio execs who still don’t believe in superhero fatigue. They legit think the problem is that their IP isn’t universal enough. As predicted, they think Barbie was about the doll.”

She then shared a meme mocking these studio executives questioning, “why would anyone listen to what the audience wants??”

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There’s likely a lot of truth to what Matoo has to say. Former Marvel Studios Vice President Victoria Alonso previously shared back in 2021 during the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ Outfest Legacy Awards that “Diversity and inclusion is not a political game for us.

She added, “It is 100% a responsibility because you don’t get to have the global success that we have given the Walt Disney Company without the support of people around the world of every kind of human there is.

At a previous appearance at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival she said that diversity, inclusion, and gender parity “all go hand-in-hand with showing the world as it is… There’s about 6,000 characters in the Marvel library that we have access to, so if this goes right, we will be telling these stories for many, many, many, many, many generations to come.”

“And the importance of laying the ground for what’s to come is that in those stories there’s many different characters that you can actually voice,” she added.

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Furthermore, she stated, “The reason we have that success consistently is because our audience is global. You cannot have a global audience and not somehow start to represent it… For us, it was really, really, really important to have that.”

Alsono then asserted, “For the longest of time, we heard a woman-led film will never open. I say, ‘Please check, Captain Marvel made a lot of money.’ Then they always told us that Black Panther was never going to open and that nobody wanted a completely Black cast, and that made $1.3B.”

“So you can look at it from the social point of view, the cultural point of view. But truthfully, this is a business. From a fiscal point of view, you are leaving money on the table by not representing,” she explained.

The Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger made similar comments at the end of 2022. When asked about his “stance on the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ situation,” Iger said, “Well, first of all, our LGBTQ employees are very important to us and we care deeply about them. That’s a given.”

“Secondly, this company has been telling stories for a hundred years, and those stories have had a meaningful, positive impact on the world. And one of the reasons that they’ve had a meaningful, positive impact is one of our core values is inclusion, acceptance, and tolerance. And we can’t lose that. We just can’t lose that,” he asserted.

In response to the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, Iger said Disney would still promote “inclusion,” but suggested that the company must strike a “delicate balance” and “listen to [its] audience” and “have respect for the people that [it’s] serving.” This is a retreat. pic.twitter.com/bZBnQdm616

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) November 29, 2022

In fact, when questioned about Marvel Studios has been failing in recent years, Iger has punted on the idea that it’s a creative issue or that it has anything to do with heavy progressive themes.

Instead, he told CNBC, “It’s reflective not a problem from a personnel perspective, but I think in our zeal basically grow our content significantly to serve mostly our streaming offerings we ended up taxing our people way beyond, in terms of their time and their focus, way beyond where they had been.”

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He then specifically spoke to Marvel, “Marvel’s a great example of that. They had not been in the TV business at any significant level. Not only did they increase their movie output, but they ended up making a number of television series.”

“And frankly, it diluted focus and attention. And I think you are seeing that is more the cause than anything else,” he stated.

More recently, Iger blamed Covid-19 and executive oversight for the abysmal failure of The Marvels.

During an appearance at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit 2023, he said, “I think you have to look at in a couple of ways. First of all, I think the movie business is changing, actually. Box office today is about 75% of what it was pre-Covid. I think we have conditioned the audience to expect that these films will be on streaming platforms relatively quickly and that the experience of accessing them and watching them in the home is better than it ever was. One, easier to access in terms of technology. Two, just the visuals, better sets in your living room than before, and 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 and into movie theaters. Some of it is just being part of basically the social wave. Certainly, Barbie and Oppenheimer did that for two other studios. And so I think that’s one thing. Second, in our particularly case and specifically about some of those films, they were not as good, not as high in quality as some of their predecessors, our films, and as they should have been, particularly in this environment.”

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Speaking specifically to The Marvels, he said, “Well, The Marvels was shot during Covid. There wasn’t as much supervision on the set, so to speak, where we have executives there really looking over what’s being done day after day after day. And that was a result of mostly of Covid, but at the same time we increased our output tremendously to feed the streaming platforms. Too much, by the way. Definite mistake.”

“Quality needs attention to deliver quality,” Iger continued. “It doesn’t happen by accident and quantity in our case diluted quality and Marvel suffered greatly from that. So there are different reasons. And I’m the first, I’ve been very public about it and I would say right now my number one priority is to help the studio turn around creatively,” he added.

Iger then hedged, “Now, let’s also put it in perspective. We set the bar so high. Year after year after year, we had the best performance in the business, probably for a decade. And I’m not sure another studio will ever achieve some of the numbers that we achieved. We got to the point where a film didn’t do a billion dollars in global box office we were disappointed. That’s an unbelievable high standard. And we’ve got to get more realistic.”

Clearly, executives at The Walt Disney Company and Marvel Studios likely believe that they don’t have a content problem, but need to insert more progressive messaging in attempt to be more universal, which ironically takes them away from universal stories.

While Disney and Marvel Studios appear to be blinded by their own ideology, DC Studios CEO James Gunn has shared a different perspective.

In April of 2023, he told Rolling Stone, “I think there is such a thing as superhero fatigue.” However, he then stated, “I think it doesn’t have anything to do with superheroes.”

He explained, “It has to do with the kind of stories that get to be told, and if you lose your eye on the ball, which is character. We love Superman. We love Batman. We love Iron Man. Because they’re these incredible characters that we have in our hearts. And if it becomes just a bunch of nonsense onscreen, it gets really boring.”

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He elaborated, “But I get fatigued by most spectacle films, by the grind of not having an emotionally grounded story. It doesn’t have anything to do with whether they’re superhero movies or not.”

“If you don’t have a story at the base of it, just watching things bash each other, no matter how clever those bashing moments are, no matter how clever the designs and the VFX are, it just gets fatiguing, and I think that’s very, very real,” he detailed.

In an interview with Michael Rosenbaum in June, Gunn shared more of his thoughts on superhero fatigue, ““I think that what’s happened is people have gotten really lazy with their superhero stories and they have gotten to the place where, ‘Oh it’s a superhero let’s make a movie about it!’ And they make, ‘Oh! Let’s make a sequel because the first one did pretty well.’ And they aren’t thinking about why is this story special. What makes this story stand apart from other stories? What is the story at the heart of it all? Why is this character important? What makes this story different? That it fills a need for people in theaters to go see or on television.”

He repeated, “And I think that people have gotten a little lazy. And there’s a lot of biff, pow, bam stuff happening in movies. Like I’m watching third acts of superhero films where I really just don’t feel like there’s a rhyme or reason to what’s happening. I don’t care about the characters.”

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“And they’ve gotten too generic,” Gunn elaborated. “There’s this sort of middle of the road type of genre, tone that so many superhero movies as opposed to having very different genres. I like very serious superhero movies. I like very comedic superhero movies. I like ones that are really just a murder mystery, but it’s with superheroes.”

He added, “I like to see these different types of stories as opposed to seeing the same story told over and over again. I don’t know how many times I…”

Gunn would later state, “I think that also and then people say superhero fatigue. I think that you see now that it’s not a real thing. People are fatigued with repetition. And I don’t think it’s really just superhero movies, I think you’re seeing it happening now, it’s spectacle films in general.”

“But there’s a lot of spectacle films made and they just have gotten really generic,” he opined. “And they’ve gotten boring and they aren’t about characters, and there’s no emotion to them. And there should be emotion in things no matter. That should always be there: some type of emotion. I’m not saying it can’t be really light. I’m not saying it can’t be really heavy. I’m saying there should be some sort of emotion.”

“In a horror movie if you like that main character then you are much more scared when they’re about to get killed. The stakes matter,” he concluded.

What do you make Matoo’s comments about Hollywood executives and their thoughts on superhero films?

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