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The character and setting designers who built the visual identity of the Marvel Universefrom the first Iron Man suit to the looks of recent villains like Killmonger, have in some cases been in the studio for more than ten years. On April 14, many of them received their dismissal letters: these tasks will be outsourced. What has happened? This April 14, in the middle of CinemaCon (a paradoxical moment, with the industry in full swing to announce films for the next two years), The Walt Disney Company executed the first big snip of the Josh D’Amaro era, your new CEO: about a thousand layoffs throughout the company. Marvel has been one of the company’s worst-hit factions: around 8% of the combined workforce of Marvel Entertainment in New York and Marvel Studios in Burbank. have suffered cuts in almost every department: film and TV production, comics, franchises, finance, legal and visual development. What the CEO says. D’Amaro, in an internal communication to those affectedacknowledges that the decision is “harsh” but clarifies that it does not reflect “his contributions or the overall strength of the company.” That is, he suggests that it is a restructuring designed before he stepped foot in the CEO’s office, inherited from the roadmap that Bob Iger left ready before leaving. It makes sense: a layoff of a thousand people is not decided overnight. Goodbye Marvel. The most symbolic blow has been suffered by the Visual Development department of Marvel Studios. Virtually all equipment has been dismantled: Only a small group of permanent employees remain to coordinate the hiring of external artists per project. This team was responsible for aspects as essential to the MCU as the costume and character design of the franchise’s films, since one of the most significant features of the MCU is the visual coherence they have maintained in thirty productions. Radical change. Now all that work is outsourced. From now on, Marvel Studios will retain a minimal team that will be responsible for hiring external artists based on each project. It is a common practice in the video game industry and in the production of visual effects (in the latter field, in fact, it had been done this way at Marvel, not without its corresponding controversies), but it represents a substantial change in model for a department that had always been integrated into the foundations of the studio. Is Marvel going bad? Not quite. It is a logical step after the latest movements that the company has made. After recognizing that under the command of Bob Chapek quantity had prevailed over qualitywhich had given rise to a certain exhaustion, after Iger’s return as CEO in 2022 there was a turnaround in the opposite direction. In 2025 there was only one MCU premiere, in 2026 we will only have ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ and ‘Avengers: Doomsday‘ in theaters and ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ and ‘VisionQuest’ on Disney+. This reduction in scale is what has made it evident that the staff was oversized. Layoffs in film and television production are the direct consequence of the reduction of the calendar. The numbers, in proportion. Between 2023 and 2025, the Iger era has already eliminated around 8,000 positions at Disney and generated a savings of 7.5 billion dollars. The current 1,000 layoffs represent less than 1% of the company’s 231,000 global employees, a number that in absolute terms may not seem very large. But the truth is that in the specific case of the Marvel Visual Development team it amounts to a certain erasure of the department at a critical moment: when we have to start preparing the continuation of ‘Doomsday’: ‘Secret Wars’, scheduled for release in December 2027. Other changes. Many of the layoffs affect the marketing department, unified under the sole command of the newly appointed head of that area of ​​the business, Asad Ayaz. As has been knownthe cuts reach marketing, advertising, production and corporate functions teams at ESPN, the studios and the product and technology area, in addition to the aforementioned cuts at Marvel. The decision fits the profile of D’Amaro, who has spent almost three decades at Disney, but his career is unrelated to the audiovisual content business. He was the architect of the largest theme park expansion in the company’s history, and the Experiences division he led generated, in the first quarter of 2026, about 75% of Disney’s total operating profit. In Xataka | ‘Avengers: Doomsday’, everything we know about Marvel’s next big event