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Marvel Studios to Produce Its Own Movies
Dekortage writes "According to the New York Times, Marvel Studios will be producing its own superhero movies instead of licensing the superheros to other Hollywood studios. It's all about the money: despite the enormous popularity of Sony Pictures' Spiderman 1 and 2, the licensing deal only netted Marvel $62 million. The article includes some tips about upcoming works: Edward Norton as Bruce Banner in a new Incredible Hulk, and Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark in Iron Man."
On the contrary, Tony Stark has been portrayed as a recovering alcoholic in the comics for decades now. If anything, RDJ wins extra points for knowing how to get in touch with the character ;-)
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
Your tongues can't repel flavor of that magnitude!
I want War machine and Iron man with the proton canon versus 100000 sentinels. I'll pay good money to see it.
Yea, first theres all the Sony Sound Stuido(TM) Fees, followed by the high cost of Sony Cameras and of course the editiong and mastering with the Sony Edtition Station Pro(TM). There was the hugh cost of Marketing from Sony Marketing and then there was all these licence fees for Blu-Ray mastering and DVD mastering (A Sony subsidary company). We havn't even talked about the cost of film (Sony Colour Tech) or film duplication (Sony Film Distrabution) and don't get me started on the Sony Legal deparment overheads or the realvent fees to MPAA/RIAA. And we don't even have a soundtrack yet.
People don't understand the high cost of movie production and distrabution.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Basically because of Hollywood Accounting.
In a nutshell, they calculate a shitload of costs (and often actually give that money to their daughter companies and such) as percentages of the income. E.g., marketting for the movie might be calculated as, say, 25% of the income, so even if your film sells a billion copies, that expense just increases accordingly. Often to the point where the movie _will_ look like it made them a loss, even if it became the greatest success of all time and sold a billion copies.
And since there is no time when you can say "ok, it's over", you can't even really call the bluff. There is no date when you can say "ok, it's over, let's divide the loot." There's always the DVD version, the Blue Ray version, the remastered edition, the "han shot third" edition, etc, so they can just say they earmarked those funds for marketting those. So, see, it's still not a profit, it's money your movie cost them.
It's not a joke, such movies as Forrest Gump or the LOTR movies, according to Hollywood, actually made a loss. Mind-boggling as that sounds.
_Why_ they do it, is so they can shaft you on royalties. Any contract where they promise you x% of the profit, is almost guaranteed to be x% of zero, since they'll massage it into looking like it made a loss.
Frankly, Marvel already made a damn good deal if they made anything at all.
Which also tells you why they'd rather take the risks. Because it beats getting shafted. Someone probably woke up to the reality that they got shafted again, and trying to get a better contract is like tilting at the windmills. So they're trying to avoid Hollywood, if they can.
Wouldn't even be the only one. The author of Forrest Gump, IIRC, also refused to sell them the rights to the sequel, after being shafted on the first (and thus only) movie. Since they said the first one made them a loss, he said something like that he can't in good conscience let any more money be wasted on a failure.
Marvel, on the other hand, obviously doesn't want to just give up on movies completely, like that guy did. So they're trying to do it themselves.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Sony rants are popular with the Slashdot crowd, but zero-profit movies have been the practice in Hollywood for a long, long time.
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There's actually a minor error in what I wrote above, Dave Cockrum didn't create X-Men, Lee and Kirby did, but he invented the new team with members like Nightcrawler and so on - the X-Men we know from todays comics and movies. Nightcrawler for instance was originally created for another book, but Cockrum decided to use him when he had to do the first X-Men story.
m l). His name actually went into common use among creators where expressing things like "I've been fingered" means that you were not given proper credit for what you did.
Another interesting case where a creator didn't get the recognition, financially and otherwise, that his work deserved was Bill Finger who the Bill Finger Award is named after (http://www.comic-con.org/cci/cci_otherawards.sht
Be alert, the world needs more lerts!