So, the San Diego Comic Con has been over for more than a week now, and I’ve been trying to keep track of all the major news and schmooze and suchlike, both the good (Neil Gaiman on Batman!) and the bad (Flash: Rebirth? Oh, god, just when I was enjoying Geoff Johns’ work again) and the potentially wonderful (Boom! doing Muppets comics? MUPPETS COMICS! YES YES YES YES YES).
But I haven’t seen anything on these two issues which I will herewhich expound.
DEAR MARVEL COMICS. It’s common knowledge at this point that your profit strategy has shifted from direct profits through publication (28 percent of revenues according to WikiInvest) to profiting from licensing (54 percent of revenues) and, more recently and directly, through movie production rather than licensing of same (no figures, but Iron Man‘s success should make it a large figure, probably larger than publication).
This is fine and dandy, so here is my question. Given that your business model is predicated on having popular characters from which you generate licensing revenues, when are you going to create some new ones?
Don’t get me wrong: I understand that you’ve got a healthy backstock of properties left mostly untouched, and Iron Man is proof enough that any character can become a franchise. Unfortunately, Fantastic Four is proof enough that you can kill a franchise for a long period of time. (It should be interesting to see if Punisher: War Zone can rehabilitate the Punisher as a movie franchise. I like Ray Livingstone, but my money is on “no.”) Yes, I know that Marvel started up Marvel Studios specifically to avoid fuckups like Elektra, but if there’s one lesson the movie business can teach you again and again from history, it is that “doing it yourself” is no guarantee of success, and usually the opposite.
My point is that as you dig deeper into the backlog of characters, and as movies get harder and harder to derive from character properties (I love Deadpool, but let’s be honest: he’s as good an example of any of “popular characters that would be hard to make a good movie about”), you need new properties which can translate to film and other licensing opportunities. (Just keeping even isn’t enough. Marvel is publicly traded. Shareholders demand growth. Nature of the beast)
And here’s the problem: Marvel hasn’t created an iconic, popular character or team in years. Runaways is probably the closest they’ve come in the last two decades, and although I’m sure many people reading this love it, it was still mostly a “critical success” sales generator even with Joss Whedon writing it. The last truly iconic characters Marvel created were Ghost Rider (1972), Wolverine (1974) and the Punisher (1974). Those characters are all older than I am.
This is important, because we’re looking at the long term here; at 1-2 movies per year (not counting the franchises Marvel effectively has no access to produce itself, like Spider-Man or the X-Men), Marvel will be out of prime real estate in about ten to fifteen years – which is about how much time it took Wolverine and the Punisher to become WOLVERINE and THE PUNISHER. Thus, the time to innovate is now.
So how about throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks? And maybe actually promoting it. I mean, before you’re looking at your backlog and trying to decide whether to make a movie about Ares, the Sentry or X-23.
DEAR DC COMICS: No digital delivery announcement still? Hey, Zuda is cute and all, but even Marvel has a digital delivery system for their comics. Not a good one – it’s ass-backwards with a lousy interface and denies the obvious realities of the internet-comics market – but at least they have some service by which comics fans can spend money to read Marvel comics online. DC doesn’t even have that.
It’s not a corporate thing, either. Warner Music sells DRM-free mp3s online. The CW sells through iTunes (and shows itself through Hulu). HBO uses iTunes. The “download content to hard drive for money” model is fully established at DC’s corporate parent.
So where is the DC digital delivery system? Does DC Comics not like money? (Actually, that would explain Reign In Hell. I kid! I kid!) No, wait, maybe it’s that DC Comics doesn’t like the idea of a new market for its products to further introduce itself to new readers! Alternately, perhaps DC is hoping that everybody who went out and bought Watchmen after they saw the trailer will also buy a copy of the Amazons Attack! trade paperback and the OMAC Omnibus.
Seriously, though – the lack of a digital delivery system for DC is mindboggling, especially when we know that the company is stressing diversifying out of the direct market and mainstreaming its sales through bookstores more and more.
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I think that Marvel has to absolutely realize that it’s worth having a title like The Order do poorly for a few years sales-wise if it means getting a new franchise out there and established. I do think that most creators are unwilling to give their original creations to Marvel and DC right now, so a lot of the characters would have to be editorially pitched.
Dear Moronic Douche bag who illegally downloads comics:
Cease and desist.
Re: Marvel needs new characters – I’m sure Marvel would really LIKE to have some new characters, but as Matt D says above, who are they going to get to give them to them? Most creators these days would like to hold onto their creations, thank you very much, and at the very least they’re going to ask for more royalties and more control over non-comics licensing deals related to those characters. Marvel would probably rather milk their backstock for all it’s worth before making deals that will make them less money than their backstock.
Plus, Marvel’s backstock of characters is huge. It’s not the ginormous expanse that DC has, but it’s still substantial. And they’re hiring folks to do reboots of their backstock fairly frequently and see “what sticks”. Disused characters from the 70’s in the Ultimate line, the Squadron revamp, Ellis’s New Universe revamp – they’ve got lots of stuff to play with. And that’s not even getting into the Malibu “Ultraverse” and other characters they own and haven’t done anything with for a few decades.
I expect to see Marvel’s creator-owned line get bigger. Much as DC’s Vertigo line has expanded over the years. And I expect that Marvel will make some deals for properties off that line. But they won’t be worried about pushing them until they’re sure that they’ve milked their own wholly owned licenses for all the movies and TV shows they can get out of them.
Re: DC’s lack of digital downloads – DC doesn’t care about monthly pamphlets except to the extent that not putting out monthly pamphlets leaves money on the table that is very easy for them to get with their existing infrastructure. Moving to a digital distribution model requires them to build a new infrastructure for something that it really doesn’t seem like they’re all that interested in. I actually expect to see DC move to something like the Boom! studios model, where they serialize a few of their graphic novel collections for free after the GNs are on the shelf to try to entice folks into buying the whole book. But I’ll be very surprised if DC hangs onto the serialized pamphlet model beyond the physical brick and mortar stores – it just doesn’t make much sense as a distribution model anymore, even digitally.
Dear Moronic Douche bag who illegally downloads comics:
Cease and desist.
No?
Re: Marvel – keep in mind that Wolverine was a third-rate nobody when Marvel introduced him back in the 70s. That he’s a big name hero today and not in the dust bin of X-men forget-me-naughts is a product of good timing – Wolverine joined the X-men just as they were surging in popularity – and aggressive marketing.
Also, I think I’d say that Blade was at least as iconic as Punisher – probably more iconic than Ghost Rider – and he popped up in ’73, too. So, don’t forget him.
And then there’s the fact that the entire hero genre is rather played out. We’ve run the gammit of what characters can actually do. Make something from scratch and I bet you I can find a Marvel character or two that already has whatever crazy, awesome, squirly, ridiculous powers you can come up with. There’s just no where else to go. Look at DC. They’ve got about twenty bazillion different flavors of Superman in their line-up.
We don’t need new heroes, we need new stories. Make Deadpool a parody hero flick or campy spin-off, as it was meant to be, and think you’ll be surprised how well it does. Cast him with Johnny Depp, for instance, and people will flock to the theaters to see him.
I think Marvel is trying to create new characters, they just haven’t seen any hit the big time yet. All of the ‘New Universal’ heroes are new (ignoring the fact that some of them had entirely different incarnations in another universe). There’s Skaar, Son of Hulk and this guy I’ve seen on the racks but haven’t read named Gravity. Amadaeus Cho is a great new character, although it seems he’s doomed to be a sidekick forever.
They’re probably doing the same analysis that you’re doing, MGK, but taking a different tactic. Instead of making new characters hot in new comics, they’re making new characters, letting the comics run a bit, then storing the characters away for possible relaunch in movie form someday. It’s almost as if Marvel is losing interested in making comics…
To make a good Deadpool movie they should emulate the movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. The main character narrates through the movie giving you backstory and observations, meanwhile the case, it’s a detective film, rolls along. Thrown in some more martial arts action and you’ve got yourself a fine Deadpool movie. If anyone hasn’t seen it I recommend it.
I think it’s a mistake to assume the characters need to be ‘inconic’ or ‘popular’. They don’t; they just need to be decent movie fodder. You mention Runaways, and that’s a fine example of where Marvel has in fact made some small effort (more in the past ten years than in the twenty previous, at least) to create new characters. Runaways is getting a movie adaptation. A property doesn’t need to demonstrate its success as a comic to make it a viable movie – heck, look at Blade. Can’t get a comics series out of it, but it was a perfectly profitable little movie franchise for a while there.
I agree with your central point, that Marvel could still do more to create new characters – but I don’t think they need to be worrying about the impossibility of creating another Spider-Man. Though Marvel has been focusing emphatically on its big gun licenses of late, that doesn’t mean the Ant-Mans and Runaways aren’t also viable. Let’s face it, the majority of the cinema-going audience has no familiarity with any of these characters once you get past Spider-Man. The X-Men were not internationally famous characters (no, not even Wolverine) before the Bryan Singer movie came ou.
I would absolutely love to see an X-23 movie, especially if it was a direct adaptation of the first miniseries. But that’s never going to happen, because that first miniseries is incredibly depressing.
As NonyNony says, Marvel have a long way to go before their back catalogue gets completely played out, and they do make attempts at introducing new characters — but as you’ve pointed out, such attempts aren’t always sustainable by themselves. I don’t think a “throw things at the wall and see what sticks” approach would necessarily be a good idea — firstly, the individual comic books would probably lose money, and secondly, if the new characters were written by popular writers, this would probably breed resentment among the fans (“why is J. Random Hotwriter writing these crappy new characters and not Wolverine? I’m not interested in new characters!”). That said, almost anything the Big Two could conceivably do would breed resentment among some fans, so maybe that’s not as important as I first thought…
Ah, yes, the Order. I remember people harping on it over at scans_daily. The name was . . . oh, yes. Fascist and tyrannical. And they wouldn’t support the title. Not because of any problems with the quality of the product . . . but because it was “pro-reg” book.
But of course, yeah. It’s Marvel’s fault for not trying. 😀
I’d argue that Nextwave is at least as popular as Runaways. And c’mon, who wouldn’t want an Aaron Stack action figure?
Ray Livingstone???? WTF? Tha man’s name is RAY STEVENSON. And if you’ve seen HBO’s Rome, you might think differently about his ability to re-invigorate the Punisher franchise. That is, if the studio doestn’t chop it to pieces in post.
Runaways? Young Avengers? the Order? Avengers: Initiative? The forthcoming Secret Warriors? Individual characters (Layla Miller, as an example)?
Between all of that, that’s gotta be 50+ new superheroes in the last decade.
You may not be READING it, but Marvel’s been creating new characters in addition to revamping their old ones.
As for DC, well, I’d argue Marvel doesn’t have a passable digital distribution system yet either. I would LOVE to buy a non-CRM’d virtual trade. I don’t want to buy an individual issue that’s months late. Don’t make me use Marvel’s terrible viewer either. Yick.
I WILL PAY LOTS OF $$$ FOR CURRENT .CBRS, MARVEL (and DC).
supergp: Other than the aforementioned Runaways, you’ve just named a whole bunch of concepts that aren’t standalone, which helps a lot in movie storytelling. Ghost Rider and Spider-Man and Punisher and the X-Men and even Iron Man don’t need a whole lot of 616 backstory: their origins sell themselves. But you can’t tell the story about, say, the Young Avengers without first explaining about the Avengers.
It’s not a new brand, but an expansion of an existing one. And Marvel needs more new brands.
If you don’t mind messing with continuity a little, it wouldn’t be hard to get a movie out of Young Avengers. Just show some newsreel-style clips in the beginning of Thor, Ironman, Hulk, and Captain America (all of whom the public is familiar with, and even if they don’t know “Avengers” they can figure out “Marvel’s version of The Justice League”), and then launch into the Young Avengers doing their thing.
They don’t have to get together and fight because of Avengers Disassembled; you could just as easily say Iron Lad wanted to make sure there was a back up team in case anything happened to the regular Avengers or something. Easy-peasy.
Then, once we’ve had both our Runaways movie and our Young Avengers movie, we can have a crossover movie and I will be one happy fangirl. ^-^
…Marvel’s not going to listen, are they?
I read Young Avengers knowing almost NOTHING of Avengers history. It fit in just fine.
You could’ve called it Champions and taken out the Avengers:Disassembled bit and I’d’ve never known. 😛
Oh my God. The Initiative and The Order are so fucking easy a movie would be “I can’t believe each ticket doesn’t come with a lawsuit.”
Both of them have the familiar formula of ensemble movies for relatively mundane but generally analogous films to draw on. You know, war movies with basic training sequences, cops going through police academy, any kind of hazardous occupation.
And heck, Sky High and Zoom already came out doing just this sort of thing. We’ve got the X-Men and their School for Gifted Youngsters, so it’s terribly easy to say, “yeah . . . this is a federally funded public School for Gifted Youngster . . . without the racial bigotry that says ‘mutants only.'”
The Initiative and The Order are so fucking easy a movie would be “I can’t believe each ticket doesn’t come with a lawsuit.”
Are you kidding? Both arrive from relatively generic premises: superhero army and superhero team. Something like Runaways has serious promise as a movie, because it has a brilliant hook – “what if your parents were supervillains?” Young Avengers, much as I think it too complex for a good flick per se, has one too – “untrained kids pick up where veterans left off out of desperate necessity/hero worship.”
But the Order and the Initiative are about as generic as concepts get, the superheroic equivalent of S.W.A.T. or Navy SEALS. That’s fine for a comic book, where you can make up the difference with storytelling execution and a more forgiving timeframe. But for a movie? Not a chance.
Out of curiousity, how do you think DC has been doing in the creating iconic, popular character department recently?
(I realize that DC has other issues in terms of the movie production side, such as not having any franchises outside of Batman. But one hopes that DC will eventually get it together, at which point they’ll have similar issues to deal with.)
DC has a lot more to worry about before they start worrying about movie franchises.
Besides DC/Warners has shown they can just restart a franchise…
Speaking of which, isn’t about time for a new movie version of Swamp Thing? You know a GOOD one?
Zifnab – Blade only became iconic because of the first two movies. He has always sucked as a comic book character because comics can not as yet transmit pulse popping techno beats while adequately portraying extended fight scenes.
Marvel’s biggest problem, as I see it (besides that Joe Q is still being taken seriously) is that they aren’t willing to wait 30+ years to develop a truly iconic character anymore. This was evident in the 90’s when they tried to make every single issue a freakin’ milestone. It takes a combination of the right art, the right writing and the right background to establish a great character – and Marvel needs to get over themselves that this kind of thing doesn’t always happen in 12 issues.
That said, Marvel could easily take Fight-man and Deadpool and make their own version of The World’s Finest.
No disrespect, MGK, but I think you’re completely wrong about Marvel here. They’ve made a heavy investment in new characters and teams over the last few years, in an effort to build the next generation of heroes. First off, look at who’s being spotlighted as the sole defenders of New York right now in SI: the Initiative, Young Avengers, and the new Secret Warriors. Almost every character on the front lines is an up-and-comer, while all the A-list characters are conveniently off-stage in the Savage Land. Clearly this is an effort to shine the spotlight on these new characters and expose them to casual readers, who don’t buy Marvel’s titles focusing on less famous characters. Also, Avengers: the Initiative, probably the best Avengers book on the shelf right now, is completely dedicated to putting over (to borrow a wrestling term) new heroes and villains or reinvigorating long-forgotten old ones. Bendis took guys like Cage, the Hood, and Spider-Woman and built them into marketable and interesting characters; same thing with Pak’s Hercules. Hell, even BND has tried (and usually failed, yes, but they do try) to create new villains and co-heroes for Spidey. From all apperances, Marvel is working hard to put over new characters (or characters who are so old and forgotten they might as well be new) and see which ones catch on. The problem occurs when fans just won’t acknowledge these new characters or give them the credit they (occassionally) deserve, and instead pick up five Wolverine books a week. So maybe you can criticize whether projects like the Initiative and Young Avengers have been *successful* in their efforts to create new stars, or that Marvel has promoted such efforts poorly, but you certainly can’t say they are not at least trying to make new stars. I just don’t see where you’re coming from on this one.
The Order has the “you get superpowers for one year” hook – that allows for a more fertile springboard than Generic Hero Team. Alas, this has been taken away as the team got folded into the Initiative; but it does allow it to stand alone.
The problem with the “Marvel needs to create more icons!” argument is that it forgets that the Marvel icons weren’t icons when they were created. Hulk was canceled, fer chrissakes; compare the beginning of that career path with that of Ares, and they’re pretty darn close: six issues, then the Avengers. The Punisher’s first series was in 1986. Ghost Rider was canceled in ’83 and didn’t get touched for the better part of a decade; from 1970 to 1975 the X-Men sold well enough to be a reprint book but not well enough to produce new material for.
Marvel looks to be on the correct path now; they’re developing their older properties that need it (four examples: Ms Marvel, Iron Fist, Nova, and the New Universe) while giving recent concepts that seem to have potential more exposure (like Ares and the Sentry, despite their handwavey dismissal in the post).
How long does it take for a franchise to mature into an iconic series, anyways? I’d think the Thunderbolts would be minor icons by now. Such a cool concept at the time.
“(I love Deadpool, but let’s be honest: he’s as good an example of any of “popular characters that would be hard to make a good movie about”)”
Something I think Marvel should consider is filming shorts starring lesser-known characters. Kinda like Pixar shorts.
It’d serve to flesh out the Marvel movie universe, and hopefully get people thinking, “Hey, I’d like to see more of that guy.”
It should be somewhat thematically appropriate, of course. A scene featuring Deadpool goofing around while completing an assassination before a Spider-Man movie wouldn’t work, but it’d work just fine for the Punisher.
“Tha man’s name is RAY STEVENSON. And if you’ve seen HBO’s Rome, you might think differently about his ability to re-invigorate the Punisher franchise. ”
Wait. What?!?! Pullo is playing Frank Castle? Aside from actually liking the 2004 movie I spend most of my time actively ignoring everything Punisher, but now I think I need to see that movie.
YES! The only blog I really read and he mentions X-23 and in a movie no less (context be darned). I was thinking if they’re already going to do a wolverine origins with beak, why not throw her in too? But only if she was play by Megan Fox (zing!), kristen kreuk, or alexa vega.
Now if only you would throw in a little bit of Grace Choi…