Call Of Duty Boasts Higher Lifetime Sales Than Star Wars Or Marvel

Activision Blizzard has announced a variety of reshuffled executive positions, which collectively reshape the company's leadership structure. Each of the new roles is being filled by senior executives with the company, and the company included a brief moment of back-patting for its Call of Duty series in the announcement.

In the press release detailing the new roles, Activision mentioned that Call of Duty has generated more lifetime revenue than the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and doubled the cumulative box office of the entire Star Wars series. Take those comparisons with a grain of salt given that new video games cost roughly six times as much as a movie ticket, but it's still an impressive comparison to show the scale of the franchise.

Rob Kostich, formerly the Call of Duty executive VP and general manager, has been named the new company president. King Digital CFO and CSO Humam Sakhnini has been named president of that unit. Finally, Dennis Durkin is remaining in his role as CFO and adding a new title: President of Activision Blizzard's Emerging Businesses. The announcement also notes that, as previously announced, J. Allen Brack will continue to serve as the new president of Blizzzard Entertainment.

This comes shortly after some other shake-ups among Activision Blizzard's senior management. Activision's CFO was recently fired, and he joined Netflix. Then Blizzard's CFO left to work at the mobile payment company Square. According to SEC documents, former Blizzard president Mike Morhaime will serve his last day as an advisor on April 7, 2019.

Kostich has shepherded the Call of Duty series through some big changes, most recently overseeing the series' first entry to remove a single-player campaign entirely. Black Ops 4 focusing strictly on the multiplayer aspects, with the addition of a new battle royale mode, was potentially controversial. The game doesn't seem to have suffered for it, though, as our own GameSpot review noted that the strength of the three multiplayer pillars make it hard to miss the campaign content.