Stan Lee Sues Marvel Comics 680
night_flyer writes "In a story that demonstrates the way the entertainment industry manipulates its artists, Marvel is claiming that the 400 Million dollar blockbuster movie Spiderman produced no profits, and they are trying to weasel out of their contract that gives Stan Lee 10% of the profits from his creations. Nuff Said!"
Steve Ditko (Score:5, Informative)
Film returns should be made public! (Score:4, Informative)
This is how it works. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:/.ed already (Score:5, Informative)
Spider-Man creator sues Marvel
NEW YORK, Nov. 12 -- The creative force behind Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and the X-Men filed a $10 million lawsuit Tuesday, charging his old comic book company is cheating him out of millions of dollars in movie profits. Stan Lee, who crafted a menagerie of superpowered heroes with very human flaws, now claims Marvel Entertainment Inc. has tried to shut him out of the "jackpot" success of this summer's "Spider-Man" movie.
LEE'S ATTORNEYS filed court papers in Manhattan federal court, claiming that Marvel signed a deal to give their client 10 percent of any profits from his characters used in films and television shows.
"Spider-Man" has been the year's biggest hit, grossing more than $400 million domestically -- but the 80-year-old Lee says he hasn't seen a penny.
"Despite reaping enormous benefits from Mr. Lee's creations, defendants have failed and refused to honor their commitments to him," the lawsuit charges.
Marvel has reported millions of dollars in earnings from the film but has told Lee the company has seen no "profits" as defined by their contract.
Lee hopes a judge will intervene and make sure he gets a percentage of profits from the Ben Affleck movie "Daredevil," based on another of his creations, scheduled for release in February.
He also seeks a share of profits from the upcoming movie "The Hulk," and the sequels to "X-Men" and "Spider-Man."
The lawsuit demands damages and a court order forcing Marvel to turn over Lee's share in any profits from movies about characters he created.
Marvel issued a statement saying Lee "continues to be well-compensated" for his contributions to the industry. It said the company is "in full compliance with, and current on all payments due under, terms of Mr. Lee's employment agreement."
"Spider-Man" stars Tobey Maguire as the teenage superhero, Willem Dafoe as the villainous Green Goblin and Kirsten Dunst as love interest Mary Jane Watson. A sequel is due out in 2004.
Source of the Claim (Score:5, Informative)
OK, there's a little more info here [comics2film.com].
Namely, that the source of the claim is not from any copyright or other rights as creator of the characters, but from a 1998 contract giving him royalties for the licensing of his creations, but not the actual comic book sales.
Looks like it's going to be a legal wrangle over whether movie profits can be considered to be royalties.
Not about creator rights, it's about Contracts. (Score:5, Informative)
This is one of the best articles I've read on this situation. It helps if you have some idea of the US Comics industry but Paul O'Brien is a good enough writer to make it all crystal clear. FWIW, Paul is a UK Lawyer.
http://www.ninthart.com/display.php?article=428
The Contract (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, should've held the parent post until I found the contract [sec.gov].
The pertinent clause is:
(ii) You also continue to have the benefit of a single full-time assistant. (f) In addition, you shall be paid participation equal to 10% of the profits derived during your life by Marvel (including subsidiaries and affiliates) from the profits of any live action or animation television or movie (including ancillary rights) productions utilizing Marvel characters. This participation is not to be derived from the fee charged by Marvel for the licensing of the product or of the characters for merchandise or otherwise. Marvel will compute, account and pay to you your participation due, if any, on account of said profits, for the annual period ending each March 31 during your life, on an annual basis within a reasonable time after the end of each such period.
Note that profits are explicitly mentioned.
Re:Aint that just a load (Score:2, Informative)
The article discusses the situation of Bill Finger, the man who co-created Batman with Bob Kane. Mr. Finger apparently did more of the creating, making Batman what he is today, yet died penniless.
Good luck to Stan Lee! Excelsior!
Re:Film returns should be made public! (Score:5, Informative)
"7. SPIDER-MAN: THE MOVIE
During 1999, the Company entered into a license agreement with Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc., ("Sony") providing for the licensing of the Spider-Man characters in exchange for a gross participation in the marketing of the Spider-Man: The Movie (which was commercially released on May 3, 2002) and related releases on DVD/VHS and likely other revenue sources (e.g., syndication sales, etc.), and established an equally owned joint venture for the merchandise licensing of the Spider-Man: The Movie characters.
Earnings associated with the Company's participation in the gross proceeds of the movie have been recognized as non-refundable advance royalty payments as received, which amounted to $10 million in 1999, and $2.5 million in the second quarter of 2002. During the quarter ended September 30, 2002, Sony reported Marvel's participation through such date at approximately $2.0 million in excess of advances previously received - which amount was subsequently collected from Sony. Prospectively, additional movie royalties will be recognized as revenue - as reported by Sony. Earnings associated with our merchandising joint venture (accounted for under the equity method of accounting) amounted to approximately $1.8 million during the three month period ended September 30, 2002, and $7.1 million during the nine months ended September 30, 2002, and represent the Company's share of merchandising royalties, net of expenses. The Company's share of the joint venture's earlier losses were $0.3 million in each of the years 2000 and 2001."
Millions in revenue, but no profits?
Stan Lee is lucky he has a way to talk about this. (Score:3, Informative)
Stan lee is very lucky he has an avenue of complaint, as this happens with most every feature film. Hopefully this will be some kind of a wake-up call to filmmakers.
Blurb is wrong (Score:4, Informative)
1. Stan Lee believes he has a contract with Marvel that entitles him to 10% of all profits from all tv shows and movies based on his creations.
2. Stan Lee has not been paid for the Spider-Man movie.
3. Stan Lee is suing Marvel.
Nothing in the article explains why Marvel has not paid Stan Lee. Perhaps Stan Lee misunderstood or misremembers his contract. Or maybe Marvel has no explanation whatsoever, and was just hoping that Stan Lee was too old and senile to remember the contract. Who knows? Clearly, more information is needed.
$800m (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hah! (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe the studio/distributor made $400M (and that's revenue not profit), but Marvel only made $12M - that's what they sold the rights for. 10% of $12M is $1.2M. The article doesn't say that Stan Lee had a contract with New Line (or whoever).
Re:Blurb is wrong (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Not that unusual (Score:3, Informative)
This is like those high-school physics textbooks with statements like "assume a spherical elephant". The "perfect economy" you refer to is completely abstract and bears as much relation to the real world as a perfectly spherical elephant does to real aerodynamics. Example: Say a haircut costs a corporation $0.99. It doesn't matter if Corporation X is selling haircuts for $1 in Delaware, if Corporation Y is selling them for $2 in Anchorage, then you pay $2 because it would cost you more than $1 to get to a Corporation X branch.
You can only have a "perfect economy" if the cost of price data, knowledge of all competing products (including storing and processing the data) and shipping between any two points, and storage at either end is zero, and information and product distribution is instantaneous.
it makes sense that no good company would ever actually have "profits", although I'm having trouble coming up with a good way to explain why...
The reason a corporation would avoid profit is to avoid tax on that profit. But remember that corporations do pay a lot of tax whether or not they make a profit (payroll taxes like NI in the UK, for example), VAT, etc.
Even without this distortion, the reason a company wouldn't have profits carried over from year to year is because any money left over at the end of the year would be paid to shareholders as dividends.
Re:No Profits (Score:1, Informative)
In this particular case, Marvel Entertainment is listed as one of the production companies (along with Sony Entertainment and Columbia Entertainment).
Everyone needs to learn a little bit about product costing, predetermined overhead rates, and the difference between accounting profits and cash flows. Anyone who ever sets themselves up as getting a percentage of profit is setting themselves up to get nothing. You really want to set yourself up for a percentage of gross income.
Re:Reminiscent of Alan Moore and DC comic's Watchm (Score:3, Informative)
As for Alan Moore, great stuff coming out now, but he came back for a spawn issue first, which meant he had to deal with McFarlane (we all know what he did to gaiman), and I'm ever so glad he didn't decide to quit with companies on our side of the continent all together.
Re:Remember Forrest Gump? (Score:4, Informative)
WrongAgain! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:No Profits (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Steve Ditko (Score:2, Informative)
Marvel -- not the Movie Studio -- you fools (Score:5, Informative)
1. Stan Lee's contract is with Marvel, and
2. Marvel licensed the intellectual property to the movie studio.
3. Marvel's lawyers knew enough to negotiate for gross points, therefore
4. Marvel made a profit, and
5. Stan Lee is therefore entitled by contract to 10% of Marvel's profits.
The contract dispute is not with the movie studios who, however evil, have done nothing particularly wrong by Lee. This is all about Marvel trying to redefine those profits.
Re:Reminiscent of Alan Moore and DC comic's Watchm (Score:2, Informative)
-Tom
Re:and a backlash to this sort of crap is brewing (Score:3, Informative)
That overly simplifies the matter, which I realize I did nothing to help earlier. SSE from a larger picture involves how you handle the amount of cash let into the economy, the rate in which you tax, as well as regulations that effect business.
The goal is not to have money "trickle down" to the poor. The goal is to increase growth, thereby creating more employment opportunities at better wages.
But it doesn't work.
By what measure? During the Reagan years SSE brought down unemployment to record lows, increased the growth of the GDP, and brought inflation back into reality. On practically every measure for what is intended to do, it did in spades!
The Kennedy years (actually, going into the Johnson years) saw an even higher growth rate for the GDP following massive tax cuts.
What effectively hurt both of these was that as money increased, so did the spending at the government level. Johnson with Vietnam plus his "War on Poverty". Reagan's term saw cold war spending, plus a congress that wouldn't stop spending. In both of these cases, the economy rocked! It was the government books that fell out of balance.
What does work is holding the line on taxes and redirecting some spending from supporting the bigger companies with corporate welfare and giveaways toward supporting smaller employers with special incentives.
Exactly how does this conflict with SSE? The whole concept involves keeping the cash out in the private sector, which by it's very nature is counter to any kind of giveaways to either corporations or individuals.
You might want to look a little closer at what you're calling a complete failure. You may not find yourself that far removed from what it's actually about, and how it gets there.
Lost In The Noise: Movie studio accounting (Score:4, Informative)
The idea that a blockbuster movie like Spiderman made no profit seems ludicrous, but on paper, accountants paint a different picture. It sounds like Stan Lee signed a contract that would get him a percentage of the "adjusted gross". "Adjusted gross" is a movie mumbo-jumbo term that basically means "what's left over after everyone gets paid", which almost always comes out to be absolutely nothing.
Had Stan Lee been smart, and had the legal clout to pull it off, he should have tried for "gross points". "Gross points" are where the real money lives, and the types of contracts that grant gross points are usually reserved for the big name producers, big-wig movie execs, and A-list movie stars. Basically gross points are percentage points of the overall revenues that a movie brings in, before anything else happens to money - before expenses, before taxes, before the studios gets their checks.
My guess is that Marvel had a deal that would grant them something like half a gross point (which is actually a lot), and Stan Lee's contract was with Marvel (not the movie studio) which would give him a percentage of that cut deemed "profitable". The problem is that Marvel's own number crunchers probably account for every penny of that revenue granted by the movie studio, leaving nothing left for Mr. Lee, because there are no operating "profits".
It comes down to legal terminology in the actual contract, which is probably written to legally protect Marvel and the studios from the type of lawsuit that Stan Lee is seeking, and they will probably try to have the case dismissed based on legal precedent. (Hollywood sees this type of thing all the time) IANAL, but it seems like Mr. Lee's primary defense is that he was misled by the contract into thinking he would get a share of the actual *revenue*, not the *profits*.
-AAAWalrus
Re:Why should Stan Lee get anything? (Score:2, Informative)
-1, Factually Incorrect (Score:3, Informative)
Wow. That sounds fair. Unfortunately, it isn't. The top 20% of the population may pay 80% of the taxes, but they control over 95% of the wealth. In a fair system, the group that controlled 95% of the wealth would pay 95% of the taxes.
Sorry, Slick, but you blew it with that one. Matter of fact, I was reading the numbers not even an hour ago. I don't have the breakdown at the 80th percentile of income (top 20%), but at the 75th percentile, you have 84.01% of the total income tax being paid, but only 67.15% of total income earned. Check it out for yourself: visit this page [boortz.com] (after 13 Nov 2002, get it here [boortz.com] instead) for the breakdown at the top 1%, 5%, 10%, 25%, and 50%. If you don't like the numbers, find another reputable source (Boortz takes his from IRS reports; good luck beating that for authoritative) and present it.
Short answer is, the higher income earners are paying more than their "proportional share" of income tax in this country. I am not even going to touch the issue of whether or not they should pay more than a proportional share, as that is a topic of rabid debate, but I take exception to your use of flawed data to support any conclusion. Please try to get your facts straight before using them to argue a point.
Re:No Profits (Score:5, Informative)
for more on how movies don't make money.
BoxOfficeMojo... (Score:2, Informative)
Marvel reports third quarter profit (Score:2, Informative)