Disney Goes In Search of an Audience They Rejected

On August 21, 2025, Matt Donnelly reported in Variety about The Walt Disney Company’s push to re-acquire the male demographic, especially in the Gen Z cohort (18-24).

“Disney’s Boy Trouble: Studio Seeks original IP to Win Back Gen Z Men Amid Marvel and Lucasfilm Struggles”

Leadership at Walt Disney Studios has been pressing Hollywood creatives in recent months. Multiple sources tell Variety for movies that will bring young men back to the brand in a meaningful way. Young men defined here by sources as age 13 to 28, aka Gen Z…Numerous studies show Gen Z men in particular are a lonely gaming obsessed group who were hampered in their formative years by COVID-19 lockdowns. Not the easiest segment to grasp. But what’s surprising producers, writers, and other partners in the larger industry is that Disney has been calling for original concepts to lure the demo back to the movies.

There is no question in my mind that COVID lockdowns absolutely affected Gen Z and millennials probably more profoundly than any other generation because it caught them in the middle of school and school was shut down, churches shut down. Any opportunity for socialization and learning to deal with people, all of that stuff just gone.

And you have a government saying, “Don’t trust your neighbor. Report your neighbors. Be on the lookout for this kind of behavior and report to the authorities.” It was a paranoid Stasi-like environment that encouraged people to not trust each other. (And that division was felt among fandom as well, perhaps even more acutely in some circles. Witness the polarized responses to Gina Carano’s firing from Lucasfilm as an example.)

This young group, the wired up I-Gen crowd, in addition to being hyper-focused on YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, the latest video games and such, now has to deal with the fact that they don’t socialize with anybody. They haven’t been going out anywhere, and most of the general population has been reluctant to get back out into crowds. Violence is up, and prices are higher.

The attendance in movies is down. We’ve seen that across all the different cohorts, the different demographics, but they’re going specifically for the 13-to-28 group here because they want generation capture. The goal is to get them young and then keep them as loyal customers throughout the rest of their lives.

This is the same Disney whose multi-billion dollar content engines, Marvel and Lucasfilm, have sated men of all ages over almost two decades since the company acquired them.

I would argue it sated those appetites before Disney acquired them, not quite so much afterwards. Because after Disney bought them, the company tried to turn them into girl brands and destroyed their respective fan bases.

Sources say Disney has been seeking new IP and pitches such as splashy global adventures and treasure hunts, video game stuff, as well as seasonal fare like films for the Halloween corridor. The calls come as the Star Wars machine struggles to produce any film project. And the superhero genre sheds audiences by the minute. While two insiders say the mandate to recruit young males goes as high as the C-suite, the task primarily has fallen on David Greenbaum, the former Searchlight Pictures co-head brought on in 2024 to run Disney’s live action film business. That label has been sorely lacking in guy leaning fare, like the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, for nearly 10 years. (Studio insiders say the property is in active development, though not in its last reported iteration involving Margot Robbie.)

That’s because Jerry Bruckheimer is talking to Johnny Depp about coming back as Jack Sparrow. And the fact that it’s being floated around as an idea, even as a possibility, probably means that somebody is actually having those conversations, and it looks like it’s a very real possibility. Or else it would never see the light of day. If there was never going to be a chance that Johnny Depp would come back as Jack Sparrow, then it wouldn’t be out there even as a rumor. And for Jerry Bruckheimer to sit there and say, “Oh, yeah, I can see him coming back.” They’ve already had talks with him. They’ve already figured this out.

The article goes on to point out that the Indiana Jones franchise is also in trouble, with the latest film – which attempted to replace Harrison Ford with Phoebe Waller-Bridge in a ham-fisted manner that went over like a lead balloon – earning only $383 million worldwide on a budget of $300 million. Ouch. I didn’t realize it was that bad. That’s terrible. That’s an even bigger bomb than I thought.

And make no mistake: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was an absolute bomb.

To help him in his quest, Greenbaum has hired Daria Cercek, who used to be a Paramount Pictures and has a track record that includes Sonic the Hedgehog, A Quiet Place, and Smile while she was co-chief. So, a decent track record there, and one that complements and offers counterpoint to Greenbaum’s indie credentials. And you would think that since Disney is already snatching up millennials who have been gravitating toward all of the live-action remakes of their animated classics, they’d have figured out how to get to the next generation in line.

Not so much, it appears.

The thing is, they already had this in the bag and threw it away.

Disney screwed up. Disney is realizing they screwed up. And now, for whatever reason, they feel like it’s okay to publicly acknowledge that they screwed up, which is why we get the article in Variety. And for many years now, we in the YouTube space, all of us in the new media sphere have been saying Disney screwed up a long time ago.

Disney had the Disney princesses, and the Disney princesses had the girl demographic all locked up. No question. From The Little Mermaid to Beauty and the Beast and all of the classics – Snow White (the original, not whatever that was last year…), Cinderella, even The Rescuers -- they had the girls.

Disney now looks around the landscape and starts to think about that demographic they didn’t have yet. How do you attract the young male cohort? What kind of stories do you tell?

Enter Marvel Comics.

Disney CEO Bob Iger specifically in interviews at the time said that the reason they were buying Marvel, the reason they were making the deal for Star Wars is to get the male demographic that they didn’t already have.

“This helps give Disney more important exposure to the young male demographic that they have sort of lost some ground with in recent years,” said David Joyce, an analyst with Miller Tabak & Co. (Reuters, Aug 31, 2009 – emphasis mine)

Disney Chief Financial Officer Tom Staggs told Reuters that the process began with a meeting between Iger and Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter and evolved into merger discussions over a series of meetings. “We at Disney had admired them because of their position and asset base,” Staggs said. “With conversations over time we came to believe in the value of a combination.”

“The goal here is not to rebrand Marvel,” Iger said on a conference call.

Then in 2012, Iger worked out the deal for Disney to purchase Lucasfilm from the Maker himself, offering over $4 billion (with a B) to George Lucas for the franchise that changed movies forever. Fans were shocked, but at the time, from the outside looking in, Disney seemed to be a good fit.

Iger: “This transaction combines a world-class portfolio of content including Star Wars, one of the greatest family entertainment franchises of all time, with Disney’s unique and unparalleled creativity across multiple platforms, businesses, and markets to generate sustained growth and drive significant long-term value.” (Business Insider Oct 30, 2012)

So Disney was planning to use their broad reach and corporate resources to make these two brands – Marvel and Star Wars, both a lock for the boys – more worldwide than they already were.

Josh Dickey, film editor at Variety magazine in LA, said that Disney was a “great fit” to update Star Wars. “They’re so good at branding and brands. They’re so good at working with existing intellectual property and making it resonate with fans and marketing it very well,” he told BBC World Service radio. “They’re not as good at creating original content, except for their Pixar division.” (BBC Oct 31, 2012)

It should be noted that also in 2012, there was buzz about Disney’s possibly buying Hasbro, which is home to Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, also brands dominated by the male demographic.

The irony is that Disney already had a property that would have attracted a male audience: John Carter, directed by Andrew Stanton. Except they botched that one by taking …Of Mars out of the title and using Led Zeppelin for the trailer; there was a fan-made trailer that did so much better, as it directly connected all of our modern adventures back to the Barsoom novels.

John Carter was something the studios had been trying to do for decades. Not just Disney; Hollywood has been trying to do a movie for decades. Andrew Stanton finally cracked it. Was it great? No. But so far, it’s been the best John Carter movie we’ve had. It was marketed for crap, but it’s still a pretty decent adaptation of A Princess of Mars.

The book John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood talks about how all of this transpired and how Disney sacrificed John Carter at the altar of Marvel and Lucasfilm. It’s a tragedy what happened. It’s infuriating because they had a guy franchise, a guy-centric franchise right here with John Carter and they gave it up, tossed it out the window because they ended up with Marvel and Star Wars. And then what do they do with it? The Force is female, the M-She-U?

They tried first of all with Marvel. They tried to turn Marvel into a lifestyle brand. You remember when all of those articles came out and we got the ties and the shirts and the stick pins and the lunchboxes? It was be a lifestyle brand.

“At its core, we simply want to show everyone that Marvel can be integrated into our daily lives by highlighting everyday fashion with a hint of Marvel. We’d like to provide fun tips and ideas along the way that highlight the amazing merchandise we have available,” said Paul Gitter, SVP Marvel Licensing at Disney Consumer Products, to Pret-a-Reporter about the idea behind the initiative. “We want to ensure that everyone sees Marvel not just as a film studio, but as a trendsetting brand that includes lifestyle products.” THR (Jul 30, 2014)

In that same article from The Hollywood Reporter, there’s this quote from Ashley Eckstein, voice of Ahsoka Tano in the Clone Wars animated shows and founder of the fashion brand Her Universe: “This popularity has gone beyond just going to see the movies, watching the television shows or reading the comics. Fans are living a Marvel lifestyle and that includes adding Marvel elements to their everyday fashion.” Her Universe has since gone on to develop franchise fashion for Star Wars, Jurassic Park, DC Comics, Marvel, Studio Ghibli, The Lord of the Rings, and Wicked, to name a few. They present a fashion show every year at Comic-Con International in San Diego. Does it sell comics? Does it sell movies? Does it sell anything to boys?

Remember when Marvel launched Earth’s Mightiest Show with G4’s Blair Butler as host? (No? That’s OK. It’s not even included in her IMDb listings…) It was a lifestyle magazine web series that debuted in 2013. John Cerilli, who was Marvel’s VP of content and programming at the time, described it as “Marvel Lifestyle” to The Hollywood Reporter, saying, “We’re reaching for the pop culture aficionado, and pop culture really has grown. Comic books, and comic book genres, have really become a huge part of pop culture. It’s a lot more part of a normal part of life. Just look at the movies that come out any given weekend during the summer nowadays. It’s much bigger than it ever has been, and we want to cater to that person.” (Jul 11, 2013)

Ah, yes. The geeks have come out of the basement. It was now chic to be a geek. We were no longer sitting at the table in the corner, no longer bullied by the football team. It’s now cool to be into this stuff. Didn’t you get the memo?

Now, what’s a lifestyle brand? Lifestyle brand is all of the merchandise that’s labeled for the brand. Marvel, Star Wars, Disney Princesses, Polo, Porche, whatever. Shirts, ties, t-shirts, coffee mugs, pens, shoes, toaster ovens, golf clubs, all labeled with the brand name. You have all of this Marvel stuff without ever having to crack open a Marvel comic book, without ever having to even go see a Marvel movie or watch a Marvel TV show. Nothing. You don’t have to engage in Marvel entertainment media at all. Just buy the stuff.

You have cool Captain America shoes? How many times have you watched the movie? Never? But those are some cool Captain America shoes. That’s a lifestyle brand.

They tried to do that with Marvel. They would love to do that with Star Wars. There’s plenty of merchandise to do it. But by then, fans were starting to get alienated by the culture war ideologies seeping into the brands, and they started walking away, taking their wallets with them.

Then they tried to turn everything into a girl brand. And we saw the disastrous results of that with the MCU during phase four, phase five, everything focused on the female replacements of our primary characters. And we’re still seeing the fallout from that. They tried to do the same thing with Star Wars. Girl boss the whole thing, and how dare you if you don’t like it.

And now where are the boys? Where are the men? Where are non-females? Where are the hims?

You drove them away, Disney. Don’t like Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel? Sexist. And never mind we changed the entire process at Rotten Tomatoes to protect that movie. Don’t like Rey Skywalker Palpatine? Misogyny. And if you don’t think the X-Men have always been political, then you’re a bigot. A homophobe. You need a struggle session with Anita Sarkeesian, stat.

You drove them away, Disney. You drove them away from Marvel. You drove them away from Star Wars. You drove them away from Willow. You took a page from comic book writer Kelly Sue DeConnick, who said in October 2017, “If you don’t like my politics, don’t buy my book.” Many comic book readers took her at her word, closed their wallets, and walked away. Two years later, DeConnick was lamenting the state of affairs in the comics industry as sales shifted away from DC and Marvel to manga.

(And by the way, when the men left, their wives and girlfriends went with them...)

It hasn’t been just Disney, either. This has been happening across the entertainment industry, going back at least as far as the Ghostbusters “remake” from 2016. You all Kelly Sue DeConnicked and we all walked away. Now, as you realize the need for course correction, it’s a little too late, perhaps. Yes, the DEI is out. The new Superman is actually fun with no trace of grimdark. Fantastic Four: First Steps is oriented toward the importance of family.

There are signs of hope. But as Disney starts to founder around in search of new stories with which to attract a male audience, they need to be reminded: you had the boy brands, the audience for the boy brands where already there, and you kicked them out.

Now, you reap what you’ve sown.