Marvel and Disney Deal Has Fans Asking What Direction the Company Will Take
September 28th, 2009Can Disney make its $4 billion Marvel acquisition worth it without help from the likes of Spider-man, Wolverine and all their friends and enemies?
Disney bought Marvel because little boys don’t ask their parents to buy Disney-licensed merchandise the way little girls get theirs to buy whichever latest product has a Hannah Montana or High School Musical logo on it.
So what better way to get boys on board than to make movies about mutants, superheros and super-villains, and then turn them into toys and videogames, right?
Right. But here’s Disney’s new problem: It can’t make any movies (or videogames or toys) using some of Marvel’s most famous characters and villains — not any time soon anyway.
Why not? Marvel signed a big movie deal with Paramount in 2008 and it still owes the studio five films. Four of those films have already been announced: Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America and Avengers. (The fifth will probably be Iron Man 3.) There are opportunties for Disney and Marvel to team up. Marvel already has an Iron Man cartoon.
Prior to the Paramount deal, Marvel licensed X-Men and the Fantastic Four to Fox and Spiderman to Sony. Until those deals expire, any character introduced in any of those movies is off-limits for Disney.
That rules out a lot of Marvel’s most famous characters, including all the X-Men characters (Wolverine, etc.), Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, Thor, Iron Man and whole mess more. Suddenly, Disney’s $4 billion seems like a lot of money!
There is, however, a silver lining for the mouse house. Before Robert Downey Jr. and director Jon Favreau re-introduced the world to Iron Man in 2008, that character was hardly known as one of Marvel’s most famous heroes.
But in the end, it didn’t matter. The film grossed more than $550 million worldwide in theaters and earned several hundred million more through DVDs and merchandise.
So which lesser-known Marvel comic can Disney and Marvel turn into another billion dollar franchise? We asked Comics Reporter editor Tom Spurgeon and io9’s Graeme McMillan for some suggestions.
