Spidey's Billionaire

All of Marvel’s big winners—Spider-Man, X-Men and Iron Man—and their sequels are distributed by other studios (Sony, Fox, and Paramount, respectively). There have been less successful efforts with The Hulk. (Universal tried that one. Twice.) Vogel says he believes it’s a law of business that a company like Marvel makes most of its money from a handful of key characters. And in Marvel’s case, he says, those characters are “getting long in the tooth.”

But in the conference call, Iger said there are plenty of great characters to exploit and that Marvel’s creative executives have a strong understanding of those characters and their stories. Disney will “rely on them thoroughly,” he said. But he added that Pixar's presiding genius, John Lasseter, has already met with key Marvel creative executives and that “the group got pretty excited very fast.” With Lasseter putting some irons in the Marvel fire, Iger expressed the hope that “sparks will fly.”

At this point, Vogel figures Marvel needs lots of capital “to finance new projects and cover the downtime in between.” Under Perlmutter, Marvel has run a very tight ship; you might recall that the company made waves by offering Scarlett Johansson and Mickey Rourke a piddling $250,000 each to appear not in the art-house movie of someone’s dream but the Iron Man sequel. (The number eventually went up to something over $400,000.) If any company can make use of Marvel’s properties, it would appear to be Disney and even if it doesn’t produce fabulous results, Vogel sees no lasting harm.

The loser in the deal would appear to be Viacom, which not only has to do without a much-needed supplier of big movies to its studio, Paramount, but looks as though it was not in a position to bid for Marvel even if it had wanted to. (A company source says it did not). Viacom is simply too beset with issues—especially CEO Sumner Redstone’s complicated debt--and Paramount has bumped from one off-screen drama to the next.

First DreamWorks moved to Disney; then the studio moved Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, a thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio, from an October release into next year because it would have required too much cash to release sooner. DreamWorks Animation, another key supplier of movies, is also looking to go elsewhere.

At this point, Viacom is at the center of a paradox: Even as the town argues that the price tag for Marvel may have been too high, Paramount is getting blamed for letting the company get away at the hands of Marvel’s Mister X.

Kim Masters covers the entertainment business for The Daily Beast. She is also the host of The Business, public radio's weekly program about the business of show business. She is also the author of The Keys to the Kingdom: The Rise of Michael Eisner and the Fall of Everybody Else.

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