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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."
How about Marvel do what's right for a change and pay the creators their fair dues.
Stan Lee Media sued Marvel Entertainment for $5 billion Thursday, claiming it co-owns Marvel's superhero characters, including Spider-Man, X-Men, and the Incredible Hulk.
The company is no longer owned by Stan Lee, the comic book legend who more recently hosted the TV series Who Wants to Be a Superhero? on the Sci-Fi Channel, which was produced by his latest company, Pow Entertainment.
In the suit, filed in the Southern District of New York, Stan Lee Media seeks to assert rights to the revenue generated by its superheroes that Marvel Entertainment is profiting from.
For Marvel to come out swinging at Hollywood on money rights is the pot calling the kettle black
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And we all know how well that worked with Capcom and the Street Fighter II movie.
Edward Norton as Bruce Banner sounds kinda cool actually...but RDJ as Iron Man, I don't think Iron Man will be portrayed well hung over.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
having flashbacks of "wing commander" .. which is the result of what happens when a "game designer" decides to get into the business of making movies about his own stuff..
though, I guess that Marvel has enough money to make it 'look' exciting at any rate.
Still think they should leave the movie making to the pro's...
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Why not just make better licensing deals?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I mean certified accounting shows both spider man I & II barely broke even. /wag
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Marvel should stick with comic books. Making movies is a completely different endeavor--best left to the pros and not done "on the cheap" (as Marvel will likely try to do).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
2) But then I realized that it was Marvel's insistence on including Venom that ruined the last Spider-Man. The first two probably came out so well because Raimi himself was a fan, and probably understood the heart of the characters better than whatever goons are currently running Marvel.
3) Then I realized just how long it's been since I bought a new Marvel Comic (decades) versus how often I read old Marvel comics (weekly).
4) Crap.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
I don't really care who owes who but would be nice if they were to have Wanda the Scarlet Witch as in 1960's. Her costume like a Playboy bunny outfit, big hair, heavy makeup, long gloves, go-go boots,...
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.
Fuck that shit, I want a jawsome Street Shark action movie. That would be fintastic!! Gimmie some dorsal!!
Disney in the '80s was on the rocks, sure, and the Disney of the '90s was racking up the animated successes at the box office, but a relative flop like Treasure Planet is something a company like Disney can easily shrug off. The modern Disney is a highly diversified company, owning properties that you probably don't even realize are Disney companies. Disney is one of the Big Guys. As much as I'd rather not give Eisner credit for anything, he really put Disney on a more secure financial footing. If Disney wanted to turn out an endless series of animated flops, it could easily do so; it's just that Disney is a business, and if you can make more profit doing something else, why not?
Now, don't confuse the Disney company with the animation studio, which has fallen on hard times. Used to be an appropriately targeted Disney animated film was more or less a sure thing; what else were you going to take your kids to go see? With the advent of CGI, traditional animation (which I still love) has had a hard time competing (though Disney's deal with Studio Ghibli worked out quite well), and certainly hasn't been resourced at Disney to the same extent it used to be, even being killed off for a few years. John Lasseter has been pushing to bring it back since the Disney-Pixar merger, but who knows if there's still a mass audience for traditional animation anymore. Pixar and its CGI offerings pretty much own the family animated market these days; Disney's biggest competition is, ironically enough, the studio it now owns.
Personally, I don't think the Disney animation studio should be doing anything CGI at all; leave that to Pixar, which has the iron-clad track record in consumers' minds. Disney should be focusing the in-house animation studio on its traditional system. Unfortunately, Eisner scrapped it (one of his most atrocious decisions, in my view), and it's going to be hard to get that legacy back.
Okay. So how did they lose the rights to Superman in the first place?
Neal: Well they just signed a piece of paper.
Sam: That's all it took? Well why would DC Comics screw them out of that?
Neal: Well DC didn't screw them. There was no entity such as DC Comics at the time. There was an accountant who was one of three partners who ran a printing company who was printing comic books as a way to keep their presses moving and that was all they were really interested in doing. Of course it became a pain in the ass and they had to pay attention to it and they did pay attention to it and Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who had been working for them, brought into them this comic idea that they had been trying to sell to the syndicated strips for several years and they thought that they were never going to sell it, so why not sell it to the publisher that was publishing their detective stories and their cowboy stories? And so the publisher gave them a piece of paper to sign and said, "We'll buy it, but everything we publish, we own so you have to sign this piece of paper. I don't think it was even a fully typed out piece of paper. I think it was about three quarters of a page and they signed away their rights just like that.
Sam: Now were you able to help better their quality of life? Did they get enough money?
Neal: They got enough money to live like human beings. Well it doesn't sound like a lot these days but they got $25,000 a year. But it escalated and it was up from nothing. But it was more than that. They got their names back on the strip and they also got setted. What you call "setted" is when somebody goes, "Oh, the creators of Superman are here tonight during this benefit performance of the Superman movie. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Jerry and Joe will you take a bow?" And they were treated well, and treated well at conventions because they finally came out of their hole. They had their way paid. They earned what was at that time a living wage so they could fly places and do things. Joe got married for the first time in his life. Jerry got to live a reasonable life. He put his daughter through school. And their income went up. They had medical insurance and they had lots of benefits you have at a bigger corporation. For the first time in their lives they lived a reasonable life.
Sam: So they did okay.
Neal: They did okay at the end of their lives. At the end! At the end after they had been fucked. I don't like to use the word 'fuck' so much but when it comes to this story the word just comes to my mouth.
You can't take the sky from me...
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1. I'm sorry, but that's still no excuse for fraud and deceit. If you think someone's ideas or books are crap, then just offer less for them in the first place. Hiding money via generous transfers to daughter companies and bogus overhead rates, isn't the honest solution any way you want to slice it.
I mean, picture I offer you a generous 20% royalties if you let me make a movie based on your novel. Then somehow the movie actually does surprisingly well, but I come and say, "oh, sorry, we actually made a loss. See, Moraelin Film Marketting Inc. took 50% of the gross, and Moraelin Film Distributions Corp. took 30%, and Moraelin Props Inc took 15% for the sets, and the remaining 5% doesn't even cover the filming expenses. Those dastardly daughter companies made a tidy profit, but I made a loss, so I don't have to pay you anything." Regardless of whether it was a good novel or a bad novel, it's still dishonest. (Even if technically it might not be illegal.) I promised you some money, and did some siphoning to my other companies just to avoid paying it.
2. And the problem isn't just Forrest Gump, they do the same to better authors too. They even do it to other guys: e.g., at the bottom of it, that's why Peter Jackson isn't directing The Hobbit. They shafted him too. (And the actors too for merchandise rights, btw.) According to the studios, the LOTR movies actually made a big loss, somehow, so they don't have to pay any royalties.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Only 62 million? For how much work? Talk about wanting the entire pie.