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!"
Aint that just a load (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like these things have been going on in the comic book industry from the beginning tho.
No Profits (Score:5, Insightful)
Shareholders should be complaining to the board as you read this.
This is why you never deal in profits (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is, it's easy for acountants to find creative ways of including more "expenses" to make it look as though there were no profits. If that happens, then you have to fight it out in court. Revenues are much mroe straight forward, and harder to fudge, so it's much harder to screw you on them.
Hah! (Score:4, Insightful)
As if Stan Lee were just some burger flipper, instead of the person who created the character that they made $400 millions dollars from.
I've had it up to here with people that seem to think that a corporate lunch every now and then with their buddies makes them "creative".
Re:Aint that just a load (Score:2, Insightful)
But... but, that's not the American way! The American way is all about pleasing the shareholders.
Remove copyrights on fictional works? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why then should we feed the corporations with gullible, naive people out to change the world?
I also get increasinly mad at people who continuously get money because their granddad was a good writer. That somehow is very wrong - as in, all people should have equal opportunity and equal responsibility.
Copyrights on factual works is a bit of a different story. We have not understood the world sufficiently well to do something that drastical to the science community. However, patent reform is direly needed if our industry is going to start growing again - with real growth, not just growth based upon more effective court-room tactics.
Re:And in other news (Score:2, Insightful)
isn't
ripped off indeed.
Re:Alec Guiness?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember young Jedi..."percentage of the gross".
That's how Sir Alec Guiness, a man well used to the ins and outs of the film industry, managed to get his money. I believe Peter Cushing got the same deal, although I may be wrong in that. Percentage of the gross, not percentage of the profits.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Film returns should be made public! (Score:3, Insightful)
What, did you think you lived in a democracy?
Captain America indeed.
yipee freakin do for corporate america (Score:3, Insightful)
That might have been the original idea, but get real people. If one were to look at the behavior of the top 100 corporations, does that rule hold true? As corporations weild more political power, they are becoming the equivalent of the ruling class. The only difference now is the rich get to hide behind some corporate name and not subject themself to public scrutiney. The more things change, the more they stay the same people.
Re:Why should Stan Lee get anything? (Score:5, Insightful)
The irony is that even those are done by artists.
Business is business (Score:4, Insightful)
This just proves business is business, and the entertainment industry is - what a surprise - very adept at sugar coating their activties until, of course, the lawsuits start flying.
Business is business, and anyone sticking their head in the jaw of the corporate machine has gotta watch out for themselves. I'm sure Stan had attorneys looking after his interests so I don't know what happened there, but I do know that most companies will do anything they can to screw you should the need arise.
And yep; I've got a Masters in Finance so I know of what I speak. A few of our case studies at Uni directly factored in litigation as a "cost of doing business".
Good luck Stan! I've always enjoyed your work and genuinely wish you the best!
Here we go........again again again (Score:4, Insightful)
I trade a lot with friends. I buy a movie, when I do, second hand from a second hand store (Hollywood doesn't get their cut that way.) I've given to causes that are willing to fight RIAA and MPAA.
So, what have YOU done? Obviously quite a few of you went to see Spider Man.
Re:No Profits (Score:3, Insightful)
The profits reported are after these cuts :
Producers Pay
Actors/Director/etc pay
Cut for the guy who put in money
++++++
Some inflated expences. There is no way Stan is going to win. Marvel can easily show that the movie made a loss, well it did only after the producer took his 200 Million $ fee
Why should he get anything? (Score:2, Insightful)
There have been enough discussions on slashdot arguing for the restriction of authors copyright - so what is different here?
Um, No. (Score:5, Insightful)
But... but, that's not the American way! The American way is all about pleasing the shareholders.
Um, no. That is the corporate way. The American way is an honest wage for an honest day's work. The fact that America let large corporations hijack its government and undermine its constitution during the anti-communist ferver of the cold war may mean America kneels beneath their jackbooted heels, but it does not mean that corporatism is the ideal to which the country aspires.
Quite the opposite, in fact, and a backlash to this sort of crap is brewing.
Re:No Profits (Score:3, Insightful)
If no movies make profit, then how do studios make profit? Surely they must, or you'd hear about it on financial news etc. Or are they using the Enron method of financial reporting?
In other words, isn't claiming that a movie makes no profit a deliberate mistatement of financial earnings (ok, so it's not an official statement of earnings, but it is a statement), possibly punishable by the SEC. If they claim to have made no profit in court (and I'm sure a decent lawyer would ask about all the other movies they made as well), and then report an overall profit to the SEC, then they would be guilty of something. This should be part of Stan Lee's case, at least to the press, if not to the court.
Business 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
What about X-Men? (Score:3, Insightful)
Another reason to go P2P (Score:5, Insightful)
But when shit like this happens, I wonder whether it was worth it. It's amazing how 400mil is not enough to be considered profitable. Last I checked the movie didn't cost a billion bucks to make (I don't think it even costs 500mil).
Thanks Sony... I'll repay you with my unlimited bandwidth.
Re:Corporations and the Lost Age(s) of comics (Score:2, Insightful)
More exactly, it's what happens when corporations become publicly traded.
Re:Um, No. (Score:3, Insightful)
I wish it was still the old american way, but I can tell you that I was certainly in the (very small) minority at the major engineering institution I attended a couple years ago. I didn't have aspirations of becoming a manager and then climbing up to CEO, I wanted to sovle problems, and make enough money to afford a house and a car, and to be able to have children who wouldn't have to worry about how they would afford college.
Try going to any top campus and ask the kids what they want; when I was there they all thought of technology as the fastest path to the top, not a way to make an honest wage. I REALLY hope that this whole Enron, WorldCom, _favorite_coorporate_scandal_here_ thing has enough backlash to get US culture out of this greed driven mentality, but I don't think it will.
Could be a good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
- There's a huge amount of visibility -- everyone saw the movie and knows it made shitloads of money.
- Lee is a revered and sympathetic personality -- nobody wants to see him get screwed over.
- In spite of this, due to the way the contract is worded Marvel is probably correct in their claim that they don't owe him a dime, in the strict legal sense.
End result, Lee loses his money but the public outcry is sufficient to push changes in contract law which provide new protections for artists.Okay, it might not happen this time around -- media conglomerates are hugely powerful and genuine public outcry is hard to come by and expensive to properly focus into action. But the sort of scenario I'm describing is one of the most plausible ways for change like this to be brought about -- goad the public into outrage with an example of a mediagenic victim being screwed by the bad guys. Look at history -- many important pieces of legislation are tied to individual events which raised an outcry out of proportion to their individual significance.
Yes, it's lame when someone gets screwed like this. But it happens all the time, so when it happens in a highly public way that's better for all of us because it contributes to potential reform.
Remember Forrest Gump? (Score:5, Insightful)
Say you have a fleet of limos sitting around to drive executives/actors around. Ah, let's put that all on Spiderman... don't want to lose corporate profit by giving out higher royalties than you absolutely need to. Etc...
The incredibly stupid thing here is that Stan Lee has control over a rather large field of 'intellectual property' that said movie studios may want to draw on in the future, not to mention the sequel(s) of current films.
Imagine... Stan Lee's contract terms for Spiderman III: "5% of gross ticket sales and, oh yeah, %5 of gross ticket sales of Spiderman 1&2 you f%&#$!!!"
I'll bite (Score:3, Insightful)
I would start to tax coorporations and individuals in similar manors so that the little guy, the driving force behind the economy, has more money to spend to keep the economy going. Right now coorporate tax law dictates that coorporations do not pay income tax, they pay a profit tax, in other words, no increase in net worth, no taxes. Even a small coorporate income tax would provide enough government revenue to reduce the tax burden on the american consumer, and stimulate the economy. This would also make it much more difficult for companies to dodge their financial obligations to the government (see what Marvel is doing to Stan).
Re:I'll bite (Score:5, Insightful)
That sounds great on the surface, except that it doesn't work that way in real life, because corporations don't pay taxes, as such- they pass them on to others. Who really pays taxes when they're levied on a corporation?
Now, I know you may not care about the last one, but when you tax a corporation, you're really punishing the very people you rely on to spur the economy.
Re:I'll bite (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure what the percentage of the tax is, but it's neither oppressing nor minimal (from what the boss says).
Re:I'll bite (Score:5, Insightful)
A tax, any tax, removes currency from the economy and places it in the government, where some of it may come back into general use again. The state of the economy is not how rich the government is, but how rich the populace is.
so that the little guy, the driving force behind the economy, has more money to spend to keep the economy going.
The "little guy" does very little one way or the other in the economy, or in taxation now. Folks who would fit into this category aren't likely to invest cash into new businesses or technology. They definitely aren't going to actually hire someone.
Right now coorporate tax law dictates that coorporations do not pay income tax, they pay a profit tax, in other words, no increase in net worth, no taxes.
Are you under the impression that corporations don't pay taxes by the truckload?
Even a small coorporate income tax would provide enough government revenue to reduce the tax burden on the american consumer, and stimulate the economy.
Lost you on this point... You want to raise taxes on the folks that produce the goods that the consumer's are going to buy from? Umm, who do you think actually pays for that? The money that companies pay in taxes really does come from somewhere. You and me.
This would also make it much more difficult for companies to dodge their financial obligations to the government (see what Marvel is doing to Stan).
A tax increase would have given Stan a better contract? You really lost me on that point. Care to work the logic that brought you to that conclusion please?
Re:I'll bite (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'll bite (Score:2, Insightful)
These people profess that stealing these things are 'attacking the big corporations/establishment' when it is really just theft and that excuse rationalizes it for them and they use that to try to make it not look bad to other people. The honest way of 'attacking the big corporations/establishment' is to not buy the products and to not use them either - find alternatives or simply do without. In addition, you evangelise and persuade others to not buy/use the products.
To steal the products in the name of 'hurting' the corporations and then use those products is simply being a hypocrit (and a thief) -- especially when you are claiming it is for the 'greater good'.
Re:Um, No. (Score:3, Insightful)
No, that's the Union way. The American way is freedom and opportunity, with a little bit of antitrust and federal oversight to keep freedoms from stepping on each other.
Re:Not that unusual (Score:4, Insightful)
You economics textbook is wrong. Theoretically, one company could always undercut the other, eventually selling everything at, or even below, cost, but this never happens unless a large company is dumping the market.
Basically, it goes like this: if you can sell a widget for $5.00, companies will be willing to produce 100 of them. If you can sell a widget for $10.00, companies will be willing to produce 1,000 of them. If you can sell a widget for $15.00, companies will be willing to produce 1,000,000. (Just example numbers). Now, if a widget sells for $5.00, comsumers will be willing to purchase 1,000,000 of them. If a widget sells for $10.00, comsumers will be willing to purchase 1,000 of them. If widgets sell for $15.00, consumers will be willing to buy 100 of them.
Because supply meets demand at $10.00, that is what the average market price for a widget will be. If you try to sell them for more, you are going to have left-over stock, and if you try to buy them for less, companies are not going to bother producing them.
In perfect competition, therefore, every company makes a profit, but not a profit so great that it hurts the consumer. Unfortunatly, perfect competition is, for the most part,a pipe dream. Fortunatly, the good people running state governments are trying to tax internet sales again [com.com], which, as we all know, will make the market much better for everyone.
Re:Aint that just a load (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, it's lawsuits like this that inject a little reality into over legislated situations. Put a situation like this in front of a judge and jury ("We only made $400 million dollars so we couldn't pay him anything for the characters he created"), and common sense has a chance of asserting itself.
Stan himself should have known better! He's been in this game for a while now.
Agreed. In this case, he's been involved with movies and even personally producing and paying for distribution for over two decades that I know of... and he certainly has attorneys on payroll at Marvel that deal specifically with character licensing and renumeration for said licensing.
Still, tricky-contracts can be (and have been) slapped down in court. Common sense (aka a jury of your peers) can trump crafty contracts.
--
Evan
Re:Um, No. (Score:2, Insightful)
So we can have EU scale unemployment and lowish GDP?
http://www.californiahouse.org.uk/ExportImport/
California 1,357.8
France 1,286.3
http://www.newspress.com/2001_CAREERS_WINTER/ca
Nov of 2001 CA unemployment was at 4.8 percent.
http://www.oecd.org/pdf/M00033000/M00033976.pdf
Over the twelve months to July 2002, the standardised unemployment rates rose in France from 8.5%
to 8.9%,
Population of California - 34,480,000
Population of France - 59,000,000
I would think the public image of the United States would be unilaterial cowboys and guntoting madmen.
I'd rather have low unemployment and high productivity.
Wait, in the United States the majority of economic growth and employment growth comes from small business.
http://www.sba.gov/advo/stats/sbfaq.html
Represent more than 99% of all employers
Employ 51% of private-sector workers, 51% of workers on public assistance, and 38% of workers in high-tech jobs
Represent nearly all of the self-employed, which are 7.0% of the work force
Provide two-thirds to three-quarters of the net new jobs
Produce 51% of private-sector output
Represent 96% of all exprters of goods
Obtain 33.3% offederal prime and subcontract dollars
are 53% home-based and 3% franchises
In 1997 there were 1.2 million Hispanic-owned firms, 820,000 African-American-owned firms, 913,000 Asian- and Pacific-Islander-owned firms, and 197,300 firms owned by American Indians and Alaska Natives.
How many small businesses in the EU are owned by Turks, Algerians, Southern Asias or Eastern Europeans?
Re:I'll bite (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm, that's circular logic. The same argument could be applied if you raise taxes for individual citizens, you could claim that they have less money to spend as a cosumer, so corporations will earn less, so they're the ones who really pay the taxes.
Effectively, taxes are always paid by the economy as a whole.
Re:Outcry for artists rights? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think Stan probably has a great argument, and its something I've suspected about the "zero profit" media industry all along -- there's either fishy accounting, gluttonous overhead costs (coke, whores, lear jets, mansions, parties, lawyers, hush money), or more likely, both -- using the former to justify the latter as expenses.
But Stan will likely get mixed in with all the "bad" Hollywood news and there will be little outcry for his cause as the mud slopped by the likes of Winona, Downey, et al will stain him, too, even though he doesn't deserve it.
Re:No Profits (Score:5, Insightful)
Generally, the establishment is lucky to make 5% net on the sale of gasoline, and that's before counting expenses for operating the pumps. Did you know that you play a flat tax of a *minimum* of 0.37 on each gallon no matter what the price is? It doesn't get any cheaper as prices go down, even though it should based on what the taxes are designed to pay for! Aside from that, it's illegal to inflate gasoline prices. I do not agree with the current taxation of gasoline, but I do agree with the price. Here's why:
Relative to the value of a dollar, gasoline is cheaper in the USA now than it has been anywhere in the world, *ever*. Granted, a couple years ago we got to see 76 cent gasoline in some places, but that was abnormilly low. Where is any company in the line from the investors on the drilling rig to the store selling you the gasoline supposed to take a $35 barrel of 50 gallons of oil and turn it into something they can make money with selling it for 38 cents/gallon (not including tax). Gasoline is already being practically given away as it is. People should stop complaining so much about it and rethink their decision to buy a new $45,000 car that gets less than half the gas mileage of the land yachts of the 70's.
Re:Outcry for artists rights? (Score:3, Insightful)
Put it in simple terms: the guy who created Spider-Man didn't get a penny from the movie. Joe Sixpack, on hearing that, is going to feel sympathy for Lee. We all know there was plenty of profit to go around, if it weren't for the fuzzy accounting -- Enron, anyone? Lee could be presented as a folk hero, and Marvel comes out of this sounding like Scrooge. Spider-Man is a cultural icon, and it's icons that move the masses into action, not abstract ideals like rights.
Unfortunately, he won't get anything. (Score:2, Insightful)
Next time Stan, negotiate for gross points and be a rich man.
Re:I'll bite (Score:3, Insightful)
Putting money in the hands of the little guy means that he's going to spend it on something the big guy is selling, thus making the big guy better off. This is "trickle up" economics and it actually works to make everyone better off.
Taxing the higher wage earners does not "give" any more money to this "little guy" that keeps getting referred to. It puts these little people out of work, as they too are overhead. The primary difference between labor and taxes is that labor CAN be cut, and often is when other expenses that CAN'T go up.
The little guys have been shouldering an ever increasing amount of the tax burden for many years now, because the "standard deduction" and "minimum wage" have not kept up in any way with inflation.
Minimum wage?? No, I'm going to resist this time. Catch me on another thread and I'll dive deep into this can of worms. All I'll get into now is the very simple, count it on your fingers, math. When you increase overhead you must then cut elsewhere, or increase prices.
As to the "standard deduction"... it shouldn't need to exist in the first place! Lower the rate across the board, and screw ALL the deductions.
Where in America can you live on $3700?
Nowhere. That's why those of us who have realized this are no longer pushing brooms or flipping hamburgers for a living.
Re:Taxes and the Little Guy (Score:3, Insightful)
Before G.W. Bush - Estate (Death) Tax would have left me with $12,250 from the Estate.
How so? I was under the impression that the estate tax didn't apply to the first $1 million.
TheFrood
Re:Stan reaps what Stan sows (Score:1, Insightful)
Good question, but unfortunately, Ditko will *not* do interviews, no way, no how... that's been his stance for years and years and years.
But it would be highly ironic if Marvel subpoeaned him as a witness to detail how HE was the creative force behind Spiderman, and Stan merely filled in the word balloons... of course, then Marvel has to admit it owes Ditko (and Kirby and Wood and etc etc etc) umpteen million dollars...
You didn't read closely enough (Score:3, Insightful)
Economic profit is different than accounting profit.
Economic profit is accounting profit minus the opportunity cost of the next best thing the person/copmany could be doing. Companies do not report economic profit on their balance sheets. They report accounting profit. Accounting profit is what's at issue here.
If your textbook doesn't explain this, it's probably not a very good textbook.
The concept of economic profit is pretty interesting though. In this case, the movie studio is claiming to have made no accouting profit. This would make their economic profit negative, meaning that the company would have been better off doing something else with it's resources. This is obviously not the case, given the huge success of the movie.
What I imagine they'll do is just reinvest all their profit in the company. Since all the studio people people own stock in the company, they'll still make (theoretical) money because their stock value will rise.
There may still be a legal case here. At a whole company accouting scale they may be able to just reinvest the profit back in to the comapany, but if one looks at just a single picture, then you make be able to prove they made a profit. If they can't prove that all their "expenses" are tied to the picture, then they may not be able to figure them in when they calulated how much money the picture made.
Estate tax facts (Score:1, Insightful)
Sorry, but you're lying there. Somebody needs to mod you down seriously.
Some facts to dispute your claim:
1) The estate tax has a $1 million exemption. So, if the above event were actually to have happened, then you'd have gotten the first $1 million tax free no matter what.
2) The estate tax cut is phasing in very slowly. In 2002 it dropped from a top rate of 55% to 50%. So if your 5% savings were actually enough to build a house (say at least $70,000) and finish college (call it $20,000 - so $90,000 total) then you would have had to have inherited at least $2,800,000 ($1,000,000 not taxable, $1,800,000 taxable, taxed at 55% would be $990,000 in tax vs. $900,000 in tax at 50%).
3) If your mom died with a $2.8 million estate and you only got $90,000 out of the total after-tax estate of $1.9 million, then you have lots more problems than the estate tax.
The rhetoric on estate ('death') taxes is one of the best disinformation campaigns that I've seen.
C'Mon, Wyatt, what's the real story here..? (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.cbpp.org/5-25-00tax.htm
http://www.news.uiuc.edu/biztips/02/11estate.ht
Re:No Profits (Score:3, Insightful)
No, we're talking about companies using clever or misleading accounting to misrepresent profits. This problem is especially relevant in a down economy, where companies aren't afraid of giving lower profit reports if it means they gain elsewhere.
In this case, Marvel stands to save ~$10,000,000 USD if they can avoid paying Stan Lee. They have the rest of the money from the movie, no matter what they add or subtract before they calculate 'profit'. Investors won't worry if profits are reported low for the Spiderman movie; they know how successful it and other Comic book movies tend to be, especially if we go to war.
Spiderman is just the context, but the debate can apply to many industries.
Re:No Profits (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Marvel -- not the Movie Studio -- you fools (Score:2, Insightful)
You're right, though, the blame lies squarely on Marvel for trying to screw over one of their pillars. Marvel's been headed downwards for awhile now, anyways; comic fans have been dropping their subscriptions from them for failing to do anything original for quite some time. Movies may be the only way that Marvel can get money if they continue to act as bastards to their staff.
After all, it's easier to ignore the plot-rehashed crap comics, than it is to ignore seeing comic heroes that you grew up with coming to the big screen.
Standard entertainment industry BS (Score:2, Insightful)