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Stan Lee Sues Marvel Comics
night_flyer writes "In a story that demonstrates the way the entertainment industry manipulates its artists, Marvel is claiming that the 400 Million dollar blockbuster movie Spiderman produced no profits, and they are trying to weasel out of their contract that gives Stan Lee 10% of the profits from his creations. Nuff Said!"
the artist steve ditko should receive some credit and money too. Unfortunately, none of the press seems to care that he is a co creator.
"Do something man. Right now."
My understanding is that this is SOP for scriptwriters, for instance. No matter what the sales are, the net profit magically ends up being zero, so they never get any royalties.
Then here you go:
Spider-Man creator sues Marvel
NEW YORK, Nov. 12 -- The creative force behind Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and the X-Men filed a $10 million lawsuit Tuesday, charging his old comic book company is cheating him out of millions of dollars in movie profits. Stan Lee, who crafted a menagerie of superpowered heroes with very human flaws, now claims Marvel Entertainment Inc. has tried to shut him out of the "jackpot" success of this summer's "Spider-Man" movie.
LEE'S ATTORNEYS filed court papers in Manhattan federal court, claiming that Marvel signed a deal to give their client 10 percent of any profits from his characters used in films and television shows.
"Spider-Man" has been the year's biggest hit, grossing more than $400 million domestically -- but the 80-year-old Lee says he hasn't seen a penny.
"Despite reaping enormous benefits from Mr. Lee's creations, defendants have failed and refused to honor their commitments to him," the lawsuit charges.
Marvel has reported millions of dollars in earnings from the film but has told Lee the company has seen no "profits" as defined by their contract.
Lee hopes a judge will intervene and make sure he gets a percentage of profits from the Ben Affleck movie "Daredevil," based on another of his creations, scheduled for release in February.
He also seeks a share of profits from the upcoming movie "The Hulk," and the sequels to "X-Men" and "Spider-Man."
The lawsuit demands damages and a court order forcing Marvel to turn over Lee's share in any profits from movies about characters he created.
Marvel issued a statement saying Lee "continues to be well-compensated" for his contributions to the industry. It said the company is "in full compliance with, and current on all payments due under, terms of Mr. Lee's employment agreement."
"Spider-Man" stars Tobey Maguire as the teenage superhero, Willem Dafoe as the villainous Green Goblin and Kirsten Dunst as love interest Mary Jane Watson. A sequel is due out in 2004.
OK, there's a little more info here.
Namely, that the source of the claim is not from any copyright or other rights as creator of the characters, but from a 1998 contract giving him royalties for the licensing of his creations, but not the actual comic book sales.
Looks like it's going to be a legal wrangle over whether movie profits can be considered to be royalties.
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
My mate Al is going to kill me for slashdotting his site but:
This is one of the best articles I've read on this situation. It helps if you have some idea of the US Comics industry but Paul O'Brien is a good enough writer to make it all crystal clear. FWIW, Paul is a UK Lawyer.
http://www.ninthart.com/display.php?article=428
Sorry, should've held the parent post until I found the contract.
The pertinent clause is:
(ii) You also continue to have the benefit of a single full-time assistant. (f) In addition, you shall be paid participation equal to 10% of the profits derived during your life by Marvel (including subsidiaries and affiliates) from the profits of any live action or animation television or movie (including ancillary rights) productions utilizing Marvel characters. This participation is not to be derived from the fee charged by Marvel for the licensing of the product or of the characters for merchandise or otherwise. Marvel will compute, account and pay to you your participation due, if any, on account of said profits, for the annual period ending each March 31 during your life, on an annual basis within a reasonable time after the end of each such period.
Note that profits are explicitly mentioned.
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
This is the most common practice in the film industry. My family works in the film industry. The distribution companies never return "profits", as a few people have already noted, all of their costs for distribution are determines by themselves. They choose their own salaries, the cost of making the prints, the internal costs of advertising, etc... It's very common for filmmakers to get ripped off in this manner. It's happened to my father several times.
Stan lee is very lucky he has an avenue of complaint, as this happens with most every feature film. Hopefully this will be some kind of a wake-up call to filmmakers.
1. Stan Lee believes he has a contract with Marvel that entitles him to 10% of all profits from all tv shows and movies based on his creations.
2. Stan Lee has not been paid for the Spider-Man movie.
3. Stan Lee is suing Marvel.
Nothing in the article explains why Marvel has not paid Stan Lee. Perhaps Stan Lee misunderstood or misremembers his contract. Or maybe Marvel has no explanation whatsoever, and was just hoping that Stan Lee was too old and senile to remember the contract. Who knows? Clearly, more information is needed.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
As if Stan Lee were just some burger flipper, instead of the person who created the character that they made $400 millions dollars from.
Maybe the studio/distributor made $400M (and that's revenue not profit), but Marvel only made $12M - that's what they sold the rights for. 10% of $12M is $1.2M. The article doesn't say that Stan Lee had a contract with New Line (or whoever).
And according to my economics textbook, in perfect competition, no company ever makes a profit. After all, if one company was selling their goods at a price that brought them a profit, than some other company should be able to sell for less, and naturally everyone would buy from the cheaper company.
This is like those high-school physics textbooks with statements like "assume a spherical elephant". The "perfect economy" you refer to is completely abstract and bears as much relation to the real world as a perfectly spherical elephant does to real aerodynamics. Example: Say a haircut costs a corporation $0.99. It doesn't matter if Corporation X is selling haircuts for $1 in Delaware, if Corporation Y is selling them for $2 in Anchorage, then you pay $2 because it would cost you more than $1 to get to a Corporation X branch.
You can only have a "perfect economy" if the cost of price data, knowledge of all competing products (including storing and processing the data) and shipping between any two points, and storage at either end is zero, and information and product distribution is instantaneous.
it makes sense that no good company would ever actually have "profits", although I'm having trouble coming up with a good way to explain why...
The reason a corporation would avoid profit is to avoid tax on that profit. But remember that corporations do pay a lot of tax whether or not they make a profit (payroll taxes like NI in the UK, for example), VAT, etc.
Even without this distortion, the reason a company wouldn't have profits carried over from year to year is because any money left over at the end of the year would be paid to shareholders as dividends.
In this particular case, Marvel Entertainment is listed as one of the production companies (along with Sony Entertainment and Columbia Entertainment).
Everyone needs to learn a little bit about product costing, predetermined overhead rates, and the difference between accounting profits and cash flows. Anyone who ever sets themselves up as getting a percentage of profit is setting themselves up to get nothing. You really want to set yourself up for a percentage of gross income.
DC is owned by Warner Brothers, and Marvel meanders on its own, failing (until recently) to really capitilize on all its licenses. Marvel's financial woes- bankruptcy and the like, were generated by over expansion and the 90s comic bubble.
As for Alan Moore, great stuff coming out now, but he came back for a spawn issue first, which meant he had to deal with McFarlane (we all know what he did to gaiman), and I'm ever so glad he didn't decide to quit with companies on our side of the continent all together.
yes, Forrest Gump lost money on paper. the screenwriter and the guy who wrote the novel both got screwed because they were supposed to get a percentage of the profits. More on that here, including details on how the accounting was rigged.
"You economics textbook is wrong. Theoretically, one company could always undercut the other, eventually selling everything at, or even below, cost, but this never happens unless a large company is dumping the market." No, that Econ textbook is Not Wrong. Notice the qualifier "In perfect competition." Economically speaking, the poster cant find his butt with both hands. Perfect Competition involves supreme heterogeneity, and a FLAT (perfectly inelastic) demand function. The poster seems to think that the demand function is sloped. He must have gone to Vassar.
Your paranoia is about as subtle as the alien probe in your neck.
Bruce Campbell's home page states that he will NOT be the lizard and that IMDB is wrong.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
To all you people babbling about films not making profits, and how Stan Lee should have negotiated for a percentage of the gross, let me make it simple:
1. Stan Lee's contract is with Marvel, and
2. Marvel licensed the intellectual property to the movie studio.
3. Marvel's lawyers knew enough to negotiate for gross points, therefore
4. Marvel made a profit, and
5. Stan Lee is therefore entitled by contract to 10% of Marvel's profits.
The contract dispute is not with the movie studios who, however evil, have done nothing particularly wrong by Lee. This is all about Marvel trying to redefine those profits.
-Tom
Basically, the problem is that big movie accounting, much like big business accounting (a la Enron) has become the modern day "alchemy". With terms like gross points, net earnings, and loosely defined "profits", movie accounting provides millions of obfuscated legal terms to confuse the contractees such that no money gets paid.
The idea that a blockbuster movie like Spiderman made no profit seems ludicrous, but on paper, accountants paint a different picture. It sounds like Stan Lee signed a contract that would get him a percentage of the "adjusted gross". "Adjusted gross" is a movie mumbo-jumbo term that basically means "what's left over after everyone gets paid", which almost always comes out to be absolutely nothing.
Had Stan Lee been smart, and had the legal clout to pull it off, he should have tried for "gross points". "Gross points" are where the real money lives, and the types of contracts that grant gross points are usually reserved for the big name producers, big-wig movie execs, and A-list movie stars. Basically gross points are percentage points of the overall revenues that a movie brings in, before anything else happens to money - before expenses, before taxes, before the studios gets their checks.
My guess is that Marvel had a deal that would grant them something like half a gross point (which is actually a lot), and Stan Lee's contract was with Marvel (not the movie studio) which would give him a percentage of that cut deemed "profitable". The problem is that Marvel's own number crunchers probably account for every penny of that revenue granted by the movie studio, leaving nothing left for Mr. Lee, because there are no operating "profits".
It comes down to legal terminology in the actual contract, which is probably written to legally protect Marvel and the studios from the type of lawsuit that Stan Lee is seeking, and they will probably try to have the case dismissed based on legal precedent. (Hollywood sees this type of thing all the time) IANAL, but it seems like Mr. Lee's primary defense is that he was misled by the contract into thinking he would get a share of the actual *revenue*, not the *profits*.
-AAAWalrus
Stan Lee's contribution to spiderman is overrated. The art and plotting were done by Steve Ditko, Stan filled in the dialogue.
Do a Google search on "Buchwald" "Coming to America" "Paramount"
for more on how movies don't make money.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
According to BoxOfficeMojo.com, the movie cost 130mil to make and has so far grossed 764mil worldwide. The 2 major factors in a movie's cost, by FAR, are the production, distribution, and the advertising. Practically everything else is cake. So in this situation, distribution and advertising would have to cost 634 million dollars, or almost 5 times the movie's production costs, for there to be nothing left over. Sue them for every penny they have, man. We're with you.
According to this news article, Marvel not only made a profit, but they attributed it to the success of Spider-Man and have enjoyed rising stock prices over the past few months.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.