Disney is pulling Marvel Comics out of Midtown Manhattan after nearly 90 years — and giving just over 100 NYC-based publishing employees about 12 months to decide whether to follow to California.

Just over 100 employees in Marvel Comics' New York publishing and franchise group were called to a town hall Thursday at the company's Avenue of the Americas office in Midtown and told the operation is moving to Burbank, California, by July 2027 — or they are not.

The decision, announced by Marvel chief Kevin Feige alongside newly installed publishing leaders Brad Winderbaum and David Abdo, ends a Midtown lease that was set to expire next year anyway and consolidates all Marvel operations at Disney's Burbank campus for the first time since the company's 2009 acquisition. The company "sincerely hopes," Winderbaum and Abdo wrote in a letter obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, that affected staff "choose to continue that journey with us in California." What happens to those who don't make the move is not addressed in the letter. Orientation sessions for employees and their families were set to begin the following week.

The choice — uproot or leave — lands on a workforce with no publicly known union contract. For the affected employees, whether relocation support is sufficient, and what the severance terms look like for anyone who declines, will determine what "support" actually means. None of Marvel's NYC publishing staff spoke publicly by the time of publication.

The corporate rationale fits a real pattern. Where once most Marvel creators lived in the Tri-State area, the company said in the letter, "today's creator community is global" — and among U.S.-based creators, more are in California than New York. Disney paid $4 billion for Marvel in 2009; the move puts editorial under the same roof as Marvel Studios and the broader Disney apparatus for the first time.

Paired with the relocation announcement was a leadership change: veteran editor Stephen Wacker was named editor-in-chief, replacing C.B. Cebulski, who held the post since 2017 and is being moved to Japan to lead Marvel's manga push.

New York loses something specific here. Marvel's earlier incarnations — Timely Comics, then Atlas Comics — were founded on 42nd Street. Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers: these characters live in New York because the people who invented them did. The move leaves the city without a major comics publisher for the first time since the industry began; DC Comics left in 2015 for Warner Bros.' Burbank offices. That's a cultural footnote. The work fact is 100-plus publishing jobs that were based in Midtown will no longer be.