Excelsior! Marvel Entertainment Chairman Ike Perlmutter is finally out at Disney after getting laid off from the company’s board after Disney decided to fold Marvel Entertainment, a separate division from Marvel Studios, into other parts of the business. And for many, it’s a move couldn’t have come soon enough.
Why? Because Ike Perlmutter is perhaps the most notorious executive in the industry, after famously tried to get both Black Panther and Captain Marvel cancelled, believing that no one would ever be interested in a Black or woman hero in a Marvel film.
Those two films alone grossed around $2.5 billion for Marvel Studios.
That belief is why Kevin Feige was able to gain full control over the studio, in 2015 a man he had tried to have fired in over clashes about the budget for Doctor Strange.
Perlmutter was in charge of the the brand since the 90s and was the man who decided not only to license X-Men, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four and Daredevil out to other studios at that time, he was also the one who sold the company to Disney in 2009, a then $4 billion deal.
While Perlmutter has not made any decisions in the MCU since 2015, he has remained in the Marvel offices, which has continued tensions that both Feige and Disney head Bob Iger have both commented on.
While we can give Perlmutter some credit as the man who allowed many things in the company to happen, at the end of the day, this was a man who believed the world didn’t have an appetite for diversity, and for that, it’s time for him to go the way of the Devil Dinosaur.
The story originally comes from the New York Times.
Bye, Ike! You won’t be missed.