The Big Picture: Wrongs & Rights

[Pat Hulse]

Basically, yes. If ASM sucks and does poorly in the box office, it's plausible that Sony will scrap its plans for a sequel and try and sell the license back to Disney while it's still worth something.

And unfortunately, Disney could get a potential huge income from a collaborative work, or they could just get a small income from a failed work done by Fox or Sony (since Marvel still makes money from those movies) and then get the rights back and make an even bigger income from an in-house production that doesn't suck. The only thing they risk going the latter route is whether audiences will get sick of the properties themselves or just sick of studios other than Marvel making Marvel movies. They potentially stand to gain a lot more if they let the other studios fail. And if the other studios don't fail, they still make money off of it. There's not a lot of incentive for them to collaborate with competing studios that they already make money off of through the licensing deal. It's not so much evil as a rational business decision (though those two things are often hard to distinguish).

Hahahahaa! LOL!
To Paraphrase Fox
We'll Make Strait to DVD movies before we let Disney and Marvel have the rights back! They'll have to rip them out of our cold dead hands.

That's mostly because Fox is still making money from the X-Men franchise, and frankly, X-Men doesn't need to be a part of the MCU continuity to have continuity-based films because X-Men already includes a massive roster to choose from. For example, if they decide to move forward with the Deadpool movie, they could involve Colossus (this was a part of the original leaked draft from a couple years ago).

They might still be able to pull off a decent Fantastic Four movie now that Josh Trank is involved. Don't know if they'll try to fit it in with the X-Men continuity, though.

They might be close to running out the clock on Daredevil. It's been about 7 years since "Elektra" and the word is that they're having a lot of trouble pulling another DD movie together as quickly as they planned. They might churn out a stinker just for the sake of keeping the license, but it becomes a question of "is it really worth the production costs to keep a license that isn't making us any money?"

Daredevil and Fantastic Four could still possibly revert back, but X-Men probably never will.

And to be quite honest, that's not so bad. If you follow Marvel Comics, you'd know that all the X-Men do is make the continuity really really confusing. It might be best that they be kept separate.

 

[Rorro]

Also, here's a consideration that might switch around the math in terms of buying IP rights. I bet that The Hulk movies, Captain America, Thor, and even Iron Man are all seeing a resurgence in DVD sales, rentals and the like. I think Hollywood might discover that realistically, the owners of something like Spiderman, Daredevil or the like might as well offer to pay for the right to have there characters put in the next Avengers movie. Wanna bet that more people would see a new, say, Daredevil movie if people recognized him from Avengers? Instead of making a new Fantastic Four movie that tanks to keep the rights, perhaps they pay a small sum of money to put Fantastic Four in the next Avengers, and release THEIR movie a month or so later, and watch as legions of Avengers fans flock to their movie, even if it sucks, to eek a little more out of the universe they have come to love? Like bob said, this movie continuity is an experiment, and I suspect that changing dynamics in the business end might be an unintended consequence.

I'm probably not alone on thinking that Black Widow, Hawkeye, or Black Widow and Hawkeye would make a pretty awesome movie. I'm probably pretty close to alone when I say that I think the new Spiderman looks like it could actually be pretty decent. I mean, it kind of looks like it goes back to the web slinger being a technological invention, not a mutant power. That's something, right? Right guy? Guys...?

That would be AWESOME! But... Movie executives, like music executives, aren't much for rational and creative behavior. They are more the petty and short-term vision type, that would rather not see the others make money when they can stop them from making it, even if it means letting an investment opportunity go, such as that one. It would just be too smart a move for them.

I also think the Spider-Man movie will not suck, but I think it will most certainly not be one of the better movies of the summer, the bars been set quite high. I like the creative team, but everything around that movie stinks.

 

[medv4380]

Hahahahaa! LOL!
To Paraphrase Fox
We'll Make Strait to DVD movies before we let Disney and Marvel have the rights back! They'll have to rip them out of our cold dead hands.

That's mostly because Fox is still making money from the X-Men franchise, and frankly, X-Men doesn't need to be a part of the MCU continuity to have continuity-based films because X-Men already includes a massive roster to choose from. For example, if they decide to move forward with the Deadpool movie, they could involve Colossus (this was a part of the original leaked draft from a couple years ago).

They might still be able to pull off a decent Fantastic Four movie now that Josh Trank is involved. Don't know if they'll try to fit it in with the X-Men continuity, though.

They might be close to running out the clock on Daredevil. It's been about 7 years since "Elektra" and the word is that they're having a lot of trouble pulling another DD movie together as quickly as they planned. They might churn out a stinker just for the sake of keeping the license, but it becomes a question of "is it really worth the production costs to keep a license that isn't making us any money?"

Daredevil and Fantastic Four could still possibly revert back, but X-Men probably never will.

And to be quite honest, that's not so bad. If you follow Marvel Comics, you'd know that all the X-Men do is make the continuity really really confusing. It might be best that they be kept separate.

A bad movie can be turned out in a couple weeks for far less, and it would keep the right in their hands. These people Hate Disney, and apart from Marvel changing the Comic Movie landscape with Avengers so that Fox and Friends can never many any money off of them. Most of the licences Marvel got back were due to Studio Collapses like MGM. Though, they may forget some of the more obscure titles, but the more Marvel reminds people that they can make money they get reminded of what they bought.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

From what I heard, The Punisher has gone back to Marvel. Movies didn't make that much money (second one was okay though) and there are no plans for another one by other studios.

Not sure how or if they'll use him considering the deal with Disney is that the movies must be PG-13.

If the movies have to be PG-13 then they may just have to sit on Castle. It's too bad because I really loved War Zone but I'd rather they sit him out until Avengers: Civil War than try to soften his image.

This is the first I heard about Amazing Spider-Man 2 being announced. I'm actually kind of excited to see ASM now just to see if it's hilariously bad or just bad-bad.

 

[Sovereignty]

It's nice to have an explanation of why we wont get an epic spider-man / avengers cross over.

Still while the Avengers was AWESOME x9000, I have trouble imagining them adding more characters without removing some. The movie was paced well, but what would have happened if you had to explain how 3 more people fit into the team dynamic? Or if you had to try and find some sliver of time to hammer out the reasons why they wouldn't to create tension?


Obviously Avengers showed us anything is possible, but I still find it being super difficult.

 

[Dastardly]

Marvel already has a magic man who isn't white, i give you brother voodoo , who is a bit of a badass.

But doesn't it seem like "brother voodoo" is a little bit... stereotypical? If he's black, he must go by "brother." If he's black and into magic, it must be "voodoo." In trying to make culturally-relevant references, the primarily-white writers of these stories almost can't help boiling them down into caricatures...

Unfortunately a lot of the other international character for marvel are villains

That's a big problem, actually. A lot of these characters come from a time when that kind of thing still flew under the radar. The world wasn't ready for a minority hero, but we felt they'd be thrilled with minority villains...

 

[cricket chirps]

HAHAHAHAHAHA i never knew that about WB!!! That is hilarious news to me. X) my friends are gonna get a kick out of that. Thanks Bob

 

[Dastardly]

Not sure how true it is but I think Dr. Strange is a very likely candidate, however I don't think they'd risk making him a different ethnicity, I'll let Donald Glover tell you why (starts at about 1:00).

Interesting to me, though, that it'd be okay (and hilarious) for Michael Cera to play Shaft. You could play that for laughs, because "haha, fish out of water!" But if you tried to play, say, a black Spiderman for laughs, that would likely cause mass outrage. The treatment of these things is so all-over-the-map...

But I stand by a black Dr. Strange. With the right casting and writing, the difference would really only matter to the kind of people those kinds of differences matter to. And if it's important to some people that we have a few more minority heroes, why not? And if it's important to some people that we don't have minority heroes, why would we listen to that sort?

The world survived a black Heimdall (Thor), and a black Nick Fury. Would an Indian, Egyptian, Saudi Arabian, Malaysian, or black Dr. Strange really end the world?

 

[shadebreeze]

I personally would really like to see a movie adaptation of "1602".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_1602

... but it will probably never happen.

 

[Pat Hulse]

Hahahahaa! LOL!
To Paraphrase Fox
We'll Make Strait to DVD movies before we let Disney and Marvel have the rights back! They'll have to rip them out of our cold dead hands.

That's mostly because Fox is still making money from the X-Men franchise, and frankly, X-Men doesn't need to be a part of the MCU continuity to have continuity-based films because X-Men already includes a massive roster to choose from. For example, if they decide to move forward with the Deadpool movie, they could involve Colossus (this was a part of the original leaked draft from a couple years ago).

They might still be able to pull off a decent Fantastic Four movie now that Josh Trank is involved. Don't know if they'll try to fit it in with the X-Men continuity, though.

They might be close to running out the clock on Daredevil. It's been about 7 years since "Elektra" and the word is that they're having a lot of trouble pulling another DD movie together as quickly as they planned. They might churn out a stinker just for the sake of keeping the license, but it becomes a question of "is it really worth the production costs to keep a license that isn't making us any money?"

Daredevil and Fantastic Four could still possibly revert back, but X-Men probably never will.

And to be quite honest, that's not so bad. If you follow Marvel Comics, you'd know that all the X-Men do is make the continuity really really confusing. It might be best that they be kept separate.

A bad movie can be turned out in a couple weeks for far less, and it would keep the right in their hands. These people Hate Disney, and apart from Marvel changing the Comic Movie landscape with Avengers so that Fox and Friends can never many any money off of them. Most of the licences Marvel got back were due to Studio Collapses like MGM. Though, they may forget some of the more obscure titles, but the more Marvel reminds people that they can make money they get reminded of what they bought.

It's hard to know precisely what Fox might do considering we do not know the exact terms of the licensing agreement, but it just may be the case that Fox cannot do a direct-to-video release. After all, there have been a few direct-to-video releases for animated features involving X-Men characters, so I don't know if Fox's movie rights extends to direct-to-video stuff. If that's the case, a theatrical release has to meet certain standards. Even crappy movies still need to have a cast and crew, and if the project is obviously terrible, you'd have to pay people quite a bit to get them interested. No matter what, you'd have to spend millions of dollars. Let's use the laziest comic book movie in recent memory as an example: Jonah Hex.

Jonah Hex was thrown together on a very low budget of about $30 million. There are romantic comedies with higher budgets than this, and odds are most of it went to the actors. It STILL only made about $10 million dollars. WB lost $20 million on a lazy production.

So say Fox plans to put in about as little effort as that. Their executives would have to ask themselves "Do we really want to throw at least $20 million down the drain just so we can keep these rights?"

If the last-minute re-write of the script by Brad Caleb Kane is good enough to keep David Slade interested, and they can find a decent actor who has nothing else to do this year (they typically would have to start principal photography in order to honor the agreement), and nothing else goes awry during the production, they just may be able to pull off a product that could actually make them money, which they are definitely interested in. But if Daredevil won't make them any money, they have no real reason to waste money on keeping the license. They aren't going to spite Disney if it means losing them millions of dollars, part of which would GO to Disney, defeating the supposed purpose of childishly sitting on the license.

It is possible that Fox can get away with making a live action direct-to-video movie, but all that would do is make the IP even less valuable and make any future endeavors even more difficult to pull together, all the while costing them money.

 

[DustyDrB]

I just want to be in the meeting with these suits discussing the categorization of comic book characters.

 

[SidheKnight]

Well, as disappointing as it is that the X-Men and the Avengers can't cross over, I can at least console myself with the fact that First Class was really good. Kind of the exception, though. Other than Spider-Man (which tanked at the third film) or X-Men (which arguably tanked on the third film [I liked it well enough] but definitely tanked on the fourth film), what Marvel movies not produced by Marvel themselves have actually been any good?

Ang Lee's Hulk and Daredevil, IMO.

 

[LazyAza]

So much legal bs preventing awesome things from happening. This is why I hate copyright and ip laws, and I even studied the damn things as part of my college course. So so stupid.

 

[Right Hook]

Interesting to me, though, that it'd be okay (and hilarious) for Michael Cera to play Shaft. You could play that for laughs, because "haha, fish out of water!" But if you tried to play, say, a black Spiderman for laughs, that would likely cause mass outrage. The treatment of these things is so all-over-the-map...

But I stand by a black Dr. Strange. With the right casting and writing, the difference would really only matter to the kind of people those kinds of differences matter to. And if it's important to some people that we have a few more minority heroes, why not? And if it's important to some people that we don't have minority heroes, why would we listen to that sort?

The world survived a black Heimdall (Thor), and a black Nick Fury. Would an Indian, Egyptian, Saudi Arabian, Malaysian, or black Dr. Strange really end the world?

I think the main reason why something like Cera as Shaft would be okay is because of cultural differences, it's okay to laugh at white people in such a odd place but playing a black Spider-Man for laughs wouldn't work because there is a lot more racial tension in something like that, there are still plenty of people who would laugh at it not out of humor but out of malice, it's a lot more fragile than its counterpart. Which is completely understandable considering the history of both.

Anyway, I think it would have been awesome if Donald Glover had played Spider-Man, it would have made this new film go from 'meh, I'll probably see it' to 'Yeah, I'm seeing it opening night' for me. I'm glad they went with a black Nick Fury, he is way cooler that 616 Marvel white Fury. Also Micheal Clark Duncan as kingpin was one of the few good things about the DareDevil movie.

However I don't really like the idea of a black Dr. Strange and I'm not totally sure why, it just doesn't work for me in theory. I didn't like that Heimdall was black either, to me it felt like they just shoehorned him in there for the sake of diversity, when it really doesn't make sense given the Norse mythology, which honestly seems more racist to me than leaving him white, kinda like 'Awe man, we don't got nearly enough racial diversity in this film, hmm...which character can we turn black?' I want Dr. Strange to stay white, I guess.

Something we can both agree on though is that Marvel really needs to make a Luke Cage movie.

EDIT: I read over your post again, you really wouldn't want to see Luke Cage in a movie?!

 

[Killing_Time]

I'm sure Warner Bros. will at least attempt a JLA movie now that Avengers conquered the world in like a week. If they don't, they officially don't like money.

 

[Hexenwolf]

Going forward, Dr. Strange is the next logical choice for a stand-alone hero. He's of a different flavor from the other heroes (magic, as opposed to miscellaneous science or mythological gods), so there's room for something new.

Lots of Ant-Man friends out there, but I don't know that he could work in a stand-alone. Also, we have to ask if he's really a different enough character to add to the ensemble. Troubled science guy? We got that covered twice. He'd have to be in a shared movie (like how Black Widow was introduced via Iron Man, or Hawkeye through Thor).

Black Panther is, I feel, a character whose time has passed -- the "everything African is tribal and jungley" era in comics. The only viable reason to run with him is the racial homogeneity of the current team. That leaves us Luke Cage... and I'm not sure he's the best way to go, either. A better choice, for my money, would be a recasting of either Dr. Strange or Ant-Man as non-white.

Dr. Strange could work very well under a different race or ethnicity, as long as we avoid the tendency to make "magical minorities" so overbearingly stereotypical (basically, don't make a black Dr. Strange look like the James Bond Baron Samedi). But then again, why focus only on black? Why not Hispanic Central or South American? Indian?

Well, in theory, Iron Man is Hispanic, though Robert Downey Jr. doesn't exactly portray that.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

And even Batmen movies seem to be pretty hit and miss.

 

[Hitchmeister]

I think Warner Brothers problem is they're afraid of failure. Which ironically leads to it happening. Every time they make a super-hero movie, they go in with the attitude of, we need a really big budget to make sure this comes out right. Then usually make something lackluster and boring.

Before Marvel super-hero movies took off, they scattered the rights around and a bunch of low budget turkeys got made. But it showed all the mistakes that could be made. Got that stuff out of their system. Now they know to trust the source material.

Warner Brothers and DC, need to make a bunch of more modestly budgeted movies to try out various characters and interpretations, with less risk and less need to be a blockbuster. Once they learn to not suck, they can start building a universe franchise and the Justice League movie the comic fans want to see.

 

[Starik20X6]

I've been getting really sick of having to explain this to people, so thanks Bob! Now I'll just show this video and be done with it.

 

[spectrenihlus]

If we wanted to get Spider man, x-men, et cetera back under Marvel's roof does that mean we should boycott the new Spider-man film?