So, you’d have to be under a rock to not have heard that Disney bought Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion dollars. It’s everywhere.
The best part is just how rocky the road was for Marvel over the last decade. Back in 1996, a power play by Ronald Perelman and Carl Icahn tossed the company into bankruptcy and even after it emerged from Chapter 11, it was still unsure what the company would do to stay alive.
Then around 2000 Avi Arad comes along and pushes to get X-Men (2000) and Spiderman (2002) made into movies. Okay, technically Blade (1998) was first but while it did well, it wasn’t the blockbuster that Spider man was. Millions of dollars are made (mostly for the studios) and Marvel was suddenly on the map again.
Mr. Arad pushed even further in recent years to create a film division in Marvel that self-produced the films so Marvel could retain more of the revenue. Iron Man and the Incredible Hulk (not the Ang Lee one) were the first of those to come out in 2008.
Lo and behold, 10 years after emerging from Chapter 11 into the blinding light of a world that wrote them off for naught, Marvel just got sold for billions. Not millions, billions.
The potential was there but it took a handful of people to see the potential and make it happen (like they couldn’t have made those same blockbusters before they went bankrupt…someone was blind back then).
Now, the question is, will Disney ruin it? So far Disney’s run with Pixar post-acquisition produced Up which has done well (2nd only to Finding Nemo)…but that’s largely due to (I’m sure) the fact that John Lassiter is the Chief Creative Officer at Disney (you gotta think despite the politics within Disney it’s something of a vindication that he’s such a high ranking player in an organization that fired him for wanting to make the types of movies that made Pixar such a success).
Time will tell. Mr. Arad has moved on from Marvel but had retained ties. If he’s not around, will Marvel (or rather Disney) drop the ball? They’ve got some momentum (if they screw up the Avengers series or some of the coming sequels, they’re idiots and deserve to wither within the Disney organization).
kn
