As Disney prepares to woo movie theater owners and press at its CinemaCon panel this Thursday, new CEO Josh D’Amaro sent an email to employees announcing a sweeping wave of layoffs across all of Disney’s divisions. As the dust still begins to settle, it seems one area that has been hit hard is Marvel Studios.
Deadline reports that Disney’s layoffs, anticipated to have cut around 1,000 jobs across the company, have led to a roughly 8% reduction in staff at Marvel. While these layoffs are broadly impacting each area of Marvel at both of its offices in New York and Burbank—running the gamut of cuts to its comics publisher, to Marvel Studios, to legal and financial departments, and more—one area reportedly hit significantly by layoffs is one of Marvel Studios’ most enduring teams: its visual development team.
Initially reported by Forbes and backed up by Deadline—as members of the team began confirming lost jobs on social media—it’s believed that almost the entirety of the visual development team has been laid off, leaving a skeleton crew that will now oversee the hiring of outside contractors on a per-project basis. Sources speaking to Forbes alleged that the particular reasons for the visual development team’s reduction are in part due to Marvel’s own changes to its upcoming production slate, as well as the cost-cutting impacts of the broader round of layoffs at Disney this week.
Headed by creative director Ryan Meinerding, the concept artist whose work has helped shape the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s vision since the first Iron Man movie, the visual development team has been responsible for decades of concept art and design work across Marvel Studios’ cinematic history. Their work even goes beyond behind-the-scenes concepts: the visual development team’s work has been packaged into artbook after artbook (Meinerding even has his own dedicated one).
When Marvel reveals first looks at its adaptations of its legendary superheroes, it is more often than not through the work of the visual development team, which are then plastered across internet articles, across posters at events, on merchandise, and more. Even perhaps the most iconic version of the opening logo sequence that opens the studios’ movies (tweaked beginning with last year’s Captain America: Brave New World to offer more individually stylized ones) puts the concept work of the visual development team front and center, iconic concept art of Marvel’s heroes blurring with script lines before giving way to the studio’s logo forming.
In a memo to staff earlier this week confirming the layoffs, D’Amaro described the cuts as a reflection not on the work of the laid-off workers but on “our continual evaluation of how to more effectively manage our resources and reinvest in our businesses.” How effectively managing the reported gutting of a team that helped shape one of the biggest cinematic universes in modern moviemaking will go remains to be seen.
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