nellardo's Journal: Marvel Comics and the Movies

So my parents are making some suggestions on new career opportunities for me:

One job thought that came to me was a 60 Minutes piece on Marvel Comics. They are based in New York with their creative studios making all these super heroes.

Marvel is, I believe, still under Chapter 11 protection.

And Marvel, at least, is making money through movies based on characters they developed thirty or forty years ago. Spider-Man's (this past year's biggest movie) first appearance in print dates from well before my birth. I was reading the X-Men (two years ago, and a sequel due this summer) and Daredevil (hitting theaters any day now) in grade school.

The point of the piece was that Hollywood is making a killing on the movies. The real money is in the movies at the expense of the print.

I wouldn't analyze the situation quite like that. The margins are much better on a successful movie than a successful book (comic or prose). But the studios aren't simply in a better business. Part of the reason the movies are successful is that they come with a built-in audience. The major studios are making good on a tremendous investment of capital made by comic book publishers over the course of decades. Hollywood has always sought to mitigate the risk of making movies by banking on recognized stories, whether it was Disney ripping off the Brothers Grimm or United Artists licensing James Bond.

Comic books are sufficiently disreputable in America that Hollywood generally doesn't touch them until they've been around for more than thirty years (the exceptions, such as Spawn, are made for wildly popular comics titles which are picked up by edgy, young, desperate studios like, at the time, New Line). Superman came out twenty years ago, but dates to before World War II. Batman is slightly newer, and the first Batman movie came out slightly more recently. The time is right for Marvel titles.

The one real exception in all of this is Alan Moore. But Alan Moore is, arguably, the most widely read and recognized author in comics (Neil Gaiman is possibly more widely read, but in fiction, as he's made a Hugo-winning transition to fiction). And the properties of his that have been successfully picked up by Hollywood are in fact based on extremely old characters. "Swamp Thing" was made into a B-movie a while ago, but "Swamp Thing" is himself an old character. Last year's "From Hell" is an adaptation of Moore's telling of one variant of the Jack the Ripper story, and the forthcoming "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" is a palimpsest of characters from the late nineteenth century (including (but not limited to) Mina Murray (from Dracula), Dr. Jeckyll (and Mr. Hyde, of course), the Invisible Man, Captain Nemo, and Alan Quatermain (being played in the movie by Sean Connery)). Moore's best work is based on newer characters and has yet to be successfully adapted (Terry Gilliam was working on "Watchmen" but, AFAIK, it never got out of development, and I've heard nothing on what I consider Moore's best and most thoughtful work to date, "Promethea").

Maybe your love of comics along with your Sony background could make a fit here.

In an ideal world, it would. But the interesting action (i.e., the real deal-making) is happening with the top executives of Marvel (Avi Arad and to a lesser extent Stan Lee) and the top executives of a subset of the major studios (and Sony is the leader in these, with Spider-Man, Daredevil, and, I believe, rights on a couple of other key properties). This is a personal political game between a small number of individuals.

It is not something that someone walks into the middle of.