From Bankrupt to Bankable
Marvel Studios is a major film studio that occupies a vast chunk in the motion picture industry-it’s a money-making superhero industry that rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars annually. With an ever-growing quantity of superhero movies being released to quench the public’s voracious appetite, Marvel continues to produce some of the world’s most popular blockbusters. Little do most people know that less than 20 years ago, Marvel had entered bankruptcy in 1996. After peaking in the early 90’s, Marvel’s stock value collapsed after a catastrophic sequence of controversial business deals that cost approximately $700 million, and the comic book market crumbled. The company was drowning in debt, and as it didn’t have the money nor the time required to make its own films, ended up selling several of their major characters on lease deals. If the studio that bought the character didn’t use it within an interval of seven years, then Marvel would regain “custody”. Eventually, they would get the right of many characters back including fan favorites such as Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor but would also lose the opportunity of making hundreds of millions of dollars on Spider-Man and X-Men, owned by Sony and Fox respectively. After producing its first two successful films in 2008 (Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk), Marvel was purchased by Disney in 2009 for $4 billion, and the rest is history.
2015 is an especially historic and event-filled year for Marvel-they’re introducing a new superhero (Ant-Man) in his very own feature length movie this summer, and their third ever TV show will premiere on Netflix on April 10th. In early February, they also partnered up with Sony Pictures to bring a new version of Spider-Man to the screen with a completely new main actor and creative direction. This exciting development means that there are probably going to be characters from the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Spider-Man films and vice versa.
In any case, we will definitely be seeing a lot of Marvel and Spidey in the future.