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At this year’s Academy Awards, Victoria Alonso was stunned.
The veteran CEO of Marvel Studios and producer of the nominated film Argentina, 1985 was stopped on the red carpet while posing for photographers tasked with capturing top executives on Hollywood’s big night. But something shocked her.
“Look at that! Two women!” Alonso said of the female photographers hired for the gig (as in most corners of Hollywood, women outnumber the men in the photo gallery). Emotionally, Alonso insisted that the pair put down their cameras and posed for a photo with her in front of a giant Oscar statuette. As they all smiled, she told them, “We’ve worked so hard to get here and we’re not going anywhere.”
Eight days later, she was fired as Marvel’s president of physical production, post-production, VFX and animation, three people familiar with the matter told Variety. The reorganization came as a surprise to many in show business and within the vast Marvel comic book fandom (a community well known online and in person at the many multiplexes where the studio releases its films). Her firing has raised numerous questions about the work behind the scenes at the valuable content engine, and with it another unfavorable news cycle as Disney CEO Bob Iger tries to stabilize his parent company amid economic turmoil.
While the reason for Alonso’s termination is unclear, the sources say, the decision was made by a consortium that includes Disney Entertainment co-chairman Alan Bergman, to whom all Marvel Studios report. Alonso’s longtime boss and Marvel chief creative officer Kevin Feige is not involved in the process, added another person familiar with the exit. Finally, Feige, feeling in an impossible situation, did not intervene. Alonso was taken by surprise, another insider added.
A representative for Alonso declined to comment on this story. Marvel Studios had no comment.
Alonso joined Marvel Studios in 2006, three years before Disney acquired the label for $4 billion. For over 17 years, she was a fixture under Chief Creative Officer Kevin Feige, alongside Feige’s right-hand man and co-president Louis D’Esposito. At the same time, she worked to become her own brand – a rare open LGBTQ person and woman of color in visible leadership, known for her fiery passion and openness to diversity and inclusion in Marvel’s storytelling.
Honored by media regulators and the visual effects community alike, she is about to publish a memoir on her career advancement, aptly titled “Possibility Is Your Superpower” (slated to be published on Disney book label Hyperion Avenue).
So where in the whole multiverse did this dramatic break occur?
Numerous sources familiar with Marvel pointed to the tremendous pressure the entity has been under over the past few years to deliver compelling content not just for the theaters, but also in the form of new streaming shows designed to bolster Disney+. In 2021 and 2022, Marvel unleashed an unprecedented spate of comic adventures, releasing 17 titles — seven films, eight streaming series, and two TV specials — over 23 months.
This breakneck distribution plan, a product of the pandemic and the need to constantly feed Disney+, wasn’t Alonso’s doing, and Marvel was far from the only studio tasked with providing feature-level content for a newly launched streaming service. But it was Alonso’s job to get each of those titles through Marvel’s gargantuan post-production process, and by the summer of 2022 cracks were beginning to appear in the company’s seemingly impenetrable armor.
Courtesy of Marvel Studios
Beginning on Reddit, followed by a series of stories leaking across the web, visual effects artists began vocalizing about Marvel’s demanding post-production schedules. Complaints ranged from relentless overtime to chronic understaffing to an inability to avoid substandard work due to ever-changing deadlines, but some called Alonso a “kingmaker” who would blacklist artists who “in any way upset” them. had.
A visual effects artist recently told Variety that the biggest problem for them is Marvel’s inability to provide clear guidelines.
“The show I was on really struggled because it was an established character whose powers they reimagined for the MCU,” the artist said on condition of anonymity. Most of the complaints, they said, boiled down to a refrain: “Marvel doesn’t calculate shit beforehand.”
Another senior VFX artist threw cold water on the idea that Alonso would single out individual artists: “The idea of a very senior executive being terrifying grassroots artists feels a bit off, according to some reports,” they told Variety. Overall, three different aspiring actors in the MCU agreed that Alonso was just a supporting force on set.
“She was the epitome of professionalism and knowledgeable,” said a former Disney film executive.
Still, the drumbeat that Something Is Rotten at State of Marvel Studios only grew louder when Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was released, a film that was finished over a year before its theatrical release and is still weather-beaten became criticism of “generic” visual effects that looked like “CGI glop” and “looked very flat and dirty”. Even more critically, the film has grossed $463 million worldwide to date, the worst performance of the “Ant-Man” franchise and a number that means it will be difficult to break even in its theatrical window.
That’s the wrong path for a studio that Disney relies on as a stalwart box office whose films have grossed over $28 billion at the global box office, especially as Iger makes it clear that he’s cutting costs across the company. Insiders say Marvel Studios’ five Disney+ series, scheduled to debut in 2023, have been narrowed down to three or four, while the others are being pushed back to 2024 and possibly beyond. That will take some of the immediate pressure off Marvel’s post-production pipeline, and Alonso’s absence isn’t expected to disrupt the next Marvel title, May’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, which has a near-locked image.
Alonso’s replacement wasn’t immediately announced by Disney. Given their extensive portfolio of responsibilities, it may take more than one person to fill their footsteps. Executives gather.
Angelique Jackson and Jazz Tangcay contributed to this report.