Earlier this week, Disney warned it would be cutting 7,000 jobs, and it seems that directive went all the way to the top. As the New York Times reports, Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter, the 80-year-old chairman of Marvel Entertainment, has been let go.
According to the NYT, which described Perlmutter as “famously frugal” as well as an “irascible and unrelenting executive,” the company decided that “Marvel Entertainment, a small division centered on consumer products and run separately from Marvel Studios, was redundant and would be folded into larger Disney business units.”
His departure from the company comes after only his most recent controversy involving an attempted and ultimately unsuccessful shake-up of Disney’s board. It’s worth noting he’s the one behind the 2009 sale of Marvel (which he took over in the late ‘90s) to Disney, but he hasn’t had a hand in Marvel movies “since 2015, when when a feud with [Kevin] Feige over costs related to Doctor Strange boiled over,” or a hand in Marvel TV shows since 2019. Per the Times, his arena of control had thereafter narrowed to comics and “Marvel game licensing, certain consumer products and superhero arena shows.”