Rolling Marvel Cinematic Universe thread (+ a poll: Classic or Dud?)

I'm hopeful but doubtful that Wundagore and Bova the cow-nanny will come into play at some point.

Are they still calling Namor a mutant? They seem to go back and forth on that.

still so disappointed to learn universal gave up the namor rights, picturing jack donaghy pushing the "namorverse" was too beautiful

though universal's "monsterverse" dreams are cute too

Namor's a mutant but I don't really consider him to be an X-character, despite being a cornerstone of the books for several years during Utopia.

he also predates the x-men by almost 30 years

That doesn't mean Fox wouldn't try to claim him as a mutant. My understanding is the deals signed in the 90s for the X-verse, Spidey and Fantastic Four are incredibly broad.

if universal had the namor rights i can't imagine the language says they'd revert to fox instead of marvel

i have no doubt they're broad in terms of "anybody who showed up initially in these comics gets to be in the movies," which means sony has every spidey-born villain and fox has a kajillion mutants" but i doubt they get previously established characters who high fived spidey or wolverine

doesn't see a silver lining - they're killing off the fantastic four in the books

Marvel's two biggest pushes in 2014 have been relaunching Spidey and killing Wolverine. Third biggest is an Avengers/X-Men crossover. Their unwillingness to push non-MCU properties is overstated.

This is likely less because of the movies and more because the FF books don't sell.

feels like a false binary when it's easily two birds with one stone

I haven't read FF in decades but kinda bummed their just gonna straight up kill them (only to be revived a few years later by some star team, surely)

Not a false binary when the accusations tossed at Marvel revolve around killing titles because they don't have movie rights - when a simpler explanation is that the Fantastic Four is by far their weakest selling legacy title. The fifth-tier Wolverine books outsell FF

well they're also not allowing fantastic four toys to be made and chris claremont's saying x-authors aren't allowed to create new characters. if marvel truly had no beef with fox, surely they'd use the fantastic four movie to their promotional advantage rather than shutting down the franchise comic-wise entirely?

it's possible they're offing the legacy team so they can have fox's hip new version pop out in the comics universe once the film proves to be a hit, but you'd think they'd curb the rumors of ike perlmutter being furious if that was the case

They may well do that - Marvel timed its Spidey relaunch to coincide with the latest movie. No one outside of Marvel HQ knows what their plans are. Books that sell FF numbers get cancelled all the time so I don't see any reason to assume it's anything but a business decision for now.

As for the X-verse, I'm sure they don't want to gift a hot new character to Universal, but I would guess it's also "you have 500 mutants to play with, why do we need to put energy into a new one?"

but that's the thing - refusing to promote Fantastic Four and provide new characters to the X universe would be a business decision.

marvel makes more money by getting film rights back than by selling a few more comics off another company's movies

I'd totally forgotten in the midst of this recent newsflurry that Marvel has another five (5) series/miniseries lined up on Netflix, and another network series just around the bend.

Rumour is Marvel's TV and movie departments aren't seeing eye to eye

Marvel's Executive Vice President, Head of Television, Jeph Loeb, is disappointed that, in a departure from his work in comics, his touch has yet to turn Marvel's TV projects into the worst shows anyone has ever seen.

though universal's "monsterverse" dreams are cute too

― da croupier, Thursday, October 30, 2014 5:14 PM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ugh they tried this already and it sucked a dick

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51yI7SuBoVL._SY300_.jpg

Old Lunch's comment made me wonder who we can blame Stacy X on and Loeb dodged a bullet there (she was created by Joe Casey, whose X-Men run was so bad that I quit the books until he stopped writing them)

Hope they make a She-Hulk TV series based on the Dan Slott series from a few years back.

Someone told me that this week's FF, Ihumans, X-Men and Wolverine/Cap comics will be the first four Marvel titles with a creator credit for Jack Kirby

wait waht

was that part of the settlement?!

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2014/10/marvel-titles-now-include-jack-kirby-credit/

IIRC the movie credits just say based on comics by stan lee, jack kirby etc etc - wonder if that will change...

but that's the thing - refusing to promote Fantastic Four and provide new characters to the X universe would be a business decision.
marvel makes more money by getting film rights back than by selling a few more comics off another company's movies

It's not like doing so is going to make any rights revert, as long as superhero movies are profitable no one is going to give up a major team. - if Marvel gets the X-Men or anything else back it will be because Disney backed up Scrooge McDuck's vault for someone, knowing that they'd make money in perpetuity with a Marvel theme park.

As I said, Marvel's three biggest events of the year involve non-MCU properties.
Avengers titles are fair-to-middling sales-wise. Outside of the main Avengers title I think Black Widow is actually the top seller. Iron Man was selling FF numbers, they haven't solicited an issue in months and it's being relaunched as Superior Iron Man or Invincible Iron Man or something in the next couple of months. If all they cared about was MCU-comic synergy, wouldn't they make the Avengers or the Netflix titles their highest priority?

the idea is that marvel doesn't want this ff reboot to do well so they're doing nothing to promote it, and that while they aren't going to do the same with the x-universe, they're not going to create more characters for fox to exploit. if you refuse to believe the rumors about marvel top brass being really grumpy about fox's lock on those titles, fine, but they align pretty smoothly with what's happening.

Of course they're grumpy that Marvel sold the rights to a bunch of characters/teams 20 years before Disney was in the picture. They're grumpy about many things, I'm sure.
What I'm saying is that there's no real evidence they're in the habit of cutting off their nose to spite their face - they still make money on those properties, just less. They're never getting them back regardless of promotion by the comic wing. The only thing we know for sure is that one title that doesn't sell is getting cancelled - just like titles that are part of the MCU. On the other hand, we know that they timed their Spidey release to coincide with the movie and that their second biggest selling title of the year (behind ASM1) is about Wolverine.
Deadpool belongs to Fox or Universal, as well, and they're pumping out new Deadpool miniseries left and right - increasing his value as a potential movie.

while they're definitely not getting back the x-folk, getting back the fantastic four seems far more possible - after all, fox gave them back daredevil

No they didn't. Their option lapsed after they tried and failed to get a new movie into production

i'd argue that's a pretty semantic distinction. if they really wanted to, they could have pulled one of these

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_X5C6e3ZeY

and it still would have been better than the Affleck version!

I'm curious about the cancelling of important but low selling characters. Wonder Woman is a prime example of a character who has always had a title going because DC feels she's too important to cancel.
Fantastic Four is extremely important in Marvel's history and I'm pretty surprised they'd ever cancel it, so that makes the grudge reason seem more plausible.

I think for a few decades there has usually been more Superman titles than makes business sense because they feel he needs to appear to rival Batman?

I may be wrong, but I think DC have to publish Wonder Woman regularly or else lose the rights, so they keep her going even when it's not very financially sensible because of her importance to the DC Universe as a whole

OK, that no longer seems to be the case: from http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2005/06/03/comic-book-urban-legend-revealed-1/
COMIC URBAN LEGEND: DC must publish at least four issues of Wonder Woman a year or else lose the rights to the property.

STATUS: False

It has long been said that if DC did not publish Wonder Woman at least four times a year, that the rights would revert back to the estate of William Moulton Marston, creator of Wonder Woman.

Writer Kurt Busiek addressed the rumors earlier this year,

They are no longer true, but they were true for a long time – as I understand it, the terms were that DC had to publish at least four issues with “Wonder Woman” as the banner lead feature or rights would revert. That’s why DC did the LEGEND OF WONDER WOMAN mini-series that I wrote and Trina Robbins drew – the Perez revamp was in development, but coming along slowly, and they had to publish something to fulfil the contract terms.

They specifically didn’t want something that would be attention-getting, because they didn’t want to undercut the revamp. So they wanted something gentle and nostalgic, and we had fun doing it.

In the intervening years, though, I’m given to understand that at some point DC bought the character outright, and thus those contract terms are no longer in force.

really curious about the details of that - did all-american publications make a special deal with marston? the implication otherwise is that ALL those JSA types were at least partially creator owned

I think Marston was a special case--in more ways than one, tbh

Oh my god the new Fantastic Four movie is going to bomb so hard:

KEBBELL: He’s Victor Domashev, not Victor Von Doom in our story. And I’m sure I’ll be sent to jail for telling you that. The Doom in ours—I’m a programmer. Very anti-social programmer. And on blogging sites I’m “Doom”.

also

http://www.latino-review.com/news/exclusive-sonys-now-working-on-an-aunt-may-movie

In the context of the topic of discussion ITT, that is the most insane thing I've ever read.

that this was even spitballed is indeed a sign of how desperate they are to keep and exploit the brand, but studios spitball all kinds of shit. this prequel may have just been on a long list of spidey stories they have the rights to, and considering agent carter it does belong on that big list

also gotham. an exec might have said "give me a list of 15 spideyverse titles" to which some assistant said "jesus fuck, i dunno that stupid aunt may prequel that flopped" when they got home

I... what

If this is honestly where they're at, selling the Spider-Man rights back to Marvel has to be the better business decision for Sony at this point.

Maybe Sony could partner up with Fox and finally adapt Aunt May, Herald of Galactus. (Only if Rosemary Harris reprises the role!)

sony are straight-up trolling at this point

Wasn't Trouble written as a teen girl romance comic that just happened to feature Spiderman's family?
I think it was part of an effort to see if they could do old genres in a new way and get a new audience.

How are they going to turn that into a franchise film? This is several steps beyond Smallville.