So comics as we know them today started in the late 1930's with things like superman and batman and wonder woman. Then they got spooky and violent which upset this jerky psychologist named Wertham who said they were corrupting the youth so comics started policing themselves and were childish for til the 1960s when Marvel (Spider-man, The Fantastic Four, The Avengers) came out and that became the big thing for teens and kids with the things that we think of when we think of comic books. In the 1980s they had a revolution where they got darker once again and more real world, less romantic, it seemed like they were growing up, this made them super popular for a bit in the late eighties to the early nineties when everyone thought that buying comics could make you rich, which was dumb. This bubble burst in the mid nineties and Marvel went bankrupt, sales dropped, there were shake ups and eventually better writing and stories. And Movies.
So the way that Marvel got themselves out of Bankruptcy was to sell the film rights to the characters they owned to 20th century Fox, Sony, Lionsgate, whoever would make a movie of their stuff, and that is why we saw the early part of the 2000's packed with superhero movies. Fox made X-men, which did well, and so Sony made Spider-man, which did better, so then Fox made Fantastic Four, which is a regrettable film and too bad because I love that team. Marvel then saw that these movies staring there characters were doing really well and yet they didn't get that much of a bump in comic book sales, I'm sure they did well in merchandise from toys and bath towels and Halloween costumes but all of that money was shared with the studio in a big way. Also they didn't have creative control of their characters anymore in the public consciousness which is a big deal to them, suddenly Spider-man had to have organic web shooters because it was in the movie, they had to conform to what another company was doing with their stuff, not cool. So Marvel starts Marvel Studios, and as their first gambit makes Iron Man and a new Hulk movie. This was gutsy, because nobody knew who Iron Man was or cared at that point, add a little Downey Jr to the mix though and Marvel was able to make everything up to the Avengers off the hit they had in Iron Man and we get the movie landscape they have now with Thor and Captain America movies getting sequels and plans for an Ant Man Movie, yes that's happening, but let me blow your mind a little more.
You may not know this but Disney now owns Marvel, and I think this was planned since at least 2004 on Marvels part. They rebooted things, which is not uncommon for comics, started doing big blockbuster events and most of all really started trying to market their characters in a bigger way, particularly in a thing they did called Civil War in 2006 which featured all their characters fighting each other mainly featuring Iron Man and Captain America. They did things that got them in the news and they made sure that everybody knew about it, Spider-man made his identity public, Captain America was killed, their was constant news reports of a book being so successful they had to do second and third printings. They were prettying themselves up for a corporate buy out because it's safer to be with a big company than be on your own, as their bankruptcy had taught them. The movies were a part of this process too, they needed to prove they could make whoever bought them out big money, movies are the best way to do that. So eventually Disney comes along and buys Marvel for 4 billion dollars, that was 2009.
Warner Brothers on the other hand had already owned DC comics since basically forever, and they never really did much with it and let it be it's own thing creatively, the WB would make money off of batman t shirts and hats and would make the Batman movies but there was no real corporate oversight about what was done in the comics. This may be in part because during all this Super hero hoopla in the theaters with the Marvel movies, Warners was steadily making money off of the Harry Potter movies. That money train ended though in 2010, which meant they were going to need a new source of Tent pole movies, (tent pole movies are the BIG sellers which allow for them to make the smaller films) and so seeing that Marvel was just bought by Disney they decided that they needed to get more involved in their comic book producing company and they reorganized the whole thing as DC entertainment. They had the super successful Dark Knight trilogy but that wasn't built to last in the way they needed it to so they began trying to work out how they too can build a superhero empire in the same way that Marvel did. Hence Green Lantern, which wasn't great. This whole thing has just been set up for the world we are living in today....need a breather? I know I do. More in the next post.
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