If you go see the new Fantastic Four movie when it hits theaters Friday, that iconic red-and-white Marvel banner will probably fill the screen during the opening credits. But don't be fooled. This isn't a Marvel movie.
Yes, the Fantastic Four did debut in its own Marvel Comics book in 1961. So Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch and the Thing are indeed Marvel superheroes. But we're talking about movies here, and in this medium, they belong to 20th Century Fox, not Disney — which acquired Marvel Entertainment in 2009. And it's all Marvel's fault.
Back in the 1990s, Marvel was not the media juggernaut we know today. Its first attempts at movie-making were over-the-top campy affairs, like 1989 TV movie The Trial of the Incredible Hulk and Roger Corman-produced 1994 feature film The Fantastic Four. With its comic book and trading card sales in decline, Marvel was on the brink of financial ruin, and the company filed for bankruptcy in late 1996.
Around this time, Marvel made a series of licensing deals that gave the movie rights for some of its most famous characters to various studios, such as Fox. Because of Marvel's financial situation, these studios kind of had the upper hand — and as a result, Marvel only received about 5 percent of the revenue from the films that featured its licensed characters, according to The Wall Street Journal.
With the success of Fox's X-Men in 2000 and Sony's Spider-Man in 2002, Marvel would soon realize that movies featuring its superheroes can be big business. In 2005, Marvel set up a credit facility for $525 million to start producing its own films. Soon thereafter, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige set the films' interlocking stories in motion, thus establishing the Marvel Cinematic Universe, of which Ant-Man recently concluded the second phase.
Unlike Marvel, Warner Bros. has access to all of the characters from DC Comics to feature in movies and TV shows. Established in 2009, the Warner Bros.-owned DC Entertainment has been responsible for putting Batman on the big screen with 2012's The Dark Knight Rises, giving The Flash his own TV show on The CW and assembling supervillains for next summer's Suicide Squad. DC has also taken a page out of Marvel's book by establishing its own connected universe for upcoming films and crossover episodes of its CW shows.
Oh, what a tangled superhero web we weave — and Spider-Man is only partly responsible for that. Keeping track of which movie studios have the rights to which Marvel superheroes is all a bit complicated — but if you break it down, it actually makes sense why we haven't seen another stand-alone Hulk movie or why it seems like there's always another Spider-Man reboot in the works. Well, a little bit more sense, at least.
Here are the Marvel superheroes by the movie studio, and what the rights mean for each franchise.
20th Century Fox
To make things even more confusing, Marvel also sometimes shares properties with studios.
One of those situations occurred in Avengers: Age of Ultron, when Disney included X-Men mutants Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver in a movie a year after Quicksilver had been featured in X-Men: Days of Future Past. However, because Fox owns the movie rights to X-Men, their characters could not be referred to by these names in the Avengers sequel. Instead, the Avengers call them by their birth names, Wanda and Pietro Maximoff. The movie also couldn't use the word "mutant," since that, too, belongs to X-Men — so these super twins were called "the enhanced" instead. There was no mention of their famous father, Magneto — thus doing away with their origin story and replacing it with H.Y.D.R.A. genetically modifying them as the source of their powers.
***SPOILER ALERT***
Perhaps Pietro was killed off in Avengers: Age of Ultron so that Disney could lessen the amount of work it had to do to keep these mutants – that is – "the enhanced" as a part of the franchise without screwing up any contracts.
Marvel's most surprising shared property came earlier this year when it announced that it had struck a deal with Sony to feature Spider-Man in an MCU movie before the character stars in his own movie in 2017. Disney had already bought Sony's merchandising rights for Spider-Man in 2011. Sony will continue to own, finance, distribute and have final creative control over the upcoming Spider-Man film, but Feige will lend his expertise as a co-producer of the movie along with Amy Pascal. The web-slinger could make an appearance in the MCU as early as 2016's Captain America: Civil War, which seems like it will feature just about every Marvel superhero at this point. Well, the ones Disney is allowed to feature, at least.
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