But we're talking about movies here, and in this medium, they belong to 20th Century Fox, not Disney — which acquired Marvel Entertainment in And it's all Marvel's fault. Back in the s, Marvel was not the media juggernaut we know today. 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 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 and Sony's Spider-Man in , Marvel would soon realize that movies featuring its superheroes can be big business.
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. Established in , the Warner Bros. 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. In the midst of all of those licensing deals with Marvel back in the '90s, Fox picked up the Fantastic Four and X-Men. The studio can also make movies featuring characters who are more on the periphery of the franchises, including Silver Surfer, who appeared in the film Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer , and Deadpool, who appeared in 's X-Men Origins: Wolverine and will be getting his own film in Perhaps following in Marvel's footsteps, Fox intends for the upcoming X-Men: Apocalypse and Deadpool films to inhabit the same universe , and there have been hints that an X-Men and Fantastic Four crossover could happen as well.
Deadpool has already made an appearance at the end of the latest Fantastic Four trailer. Marvel may have noticed Fox beefing up its superhero movie game lately. The company announced that it would be canceling its Fantastic Four comic in October , and issue — published in April — was its last. In addition to lagging comic book sales, Bleeding Cool speculated that the move was a result of the dispute over the franchise's film rights and Marvel not wanting to promote the Fantastic Four in the lead-up to Fox's upcoming movie — though Marvel never really gave an official explanation for putting an end to these comics.
Sometimes, the relationship between studios is just as entertaining as the movies they produce. This has also made Sony eager to hold onto this property. Sony has to make a movie featuring Spider-Man every three years , or else the rights go back to Marvel. For non-fans, this can get extremely confusing, as superheroes are, in essence, people who save lives. Why do different companies have to own different superheroes?
Curiosity about superhero films in the future may have been put to the spotlight courtesy of activities of big studios today. Before you go crazy about all this information, however, it may be time to consolidate just which filming studio owns the rights to which superhero character. This guide will help you do that.
Now the only outlier is Sony's wealth of Spider-Man characters, but there's still some confusion as to what they own and what is still under Marvel, so The Geek Twins have put together this fantastic graphic and updated it to reflect the newest additions to the universe, which should solve most of the big questions. The graphic is separated into four bubbles, though some overlap.
The largest bubble is Marvel's of course, as over time they've made deals with Universal for the Hulk characters as you can see in the overlap and they recently got back all their X-Men and Fantastic Four characters thanks to that landscape changing deal Disney made to buy 20th Century Fox and all their assets from 21st Century Fox.
There are two bubbles that exist outside of Marvel's, and those are Netflix green and Sony Pictures blue.
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