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April 28, 2005


I Would Go See A Stingray Movie…

What do you do if you're a really big company with Hollywood on the brain and you're stuffed full of licensing dough? I would rent DVDs and nap a lot, but I'm not Marvel, who threw their hat into the movie production game, signing a distribution deal wth Paramount and announcing an ambitious line-up of potential features and basic cost scenarios. I think that's my favorite part, that you can basically describe movies now by saying "I'll be making whatever it is at about this amount of money."

imageI know jack-all about movies, even less than I know about comics. It might be interesting to see what this does to character generation within the company's various titles; Marvel seems hellbent on orienting everything towards the movies and licensing even now, what with their run of "strong female leads" Not that any have been a hit so far, but since when does something have to be a hit anywhere else to become a movie success? Saying Marvel has a finite number of filmable characters seems true to me but only if they follow the Spider-Man model. Follow the Men in Black formula, in that the resource gets treated in no way as a pre-sold property, and the number of produceable fantasy movies seems to grow by dozens. I guess another outcome of this deal could be that Marvel gets even more neglectful-tenantish on the comic book direct market.

The capraciousness of the movie business makes projecting success or failure past next Monday morning a sucker's game, really, and with the comic book division showing it can make a profit even when Ron Perlman's people were running up and down the hallways on motorcycles toting flamethrowers or whatever, I'd say the comics stay fundamentally the same even if this turns into a disaster.

Maybe a more beneficial sign for comics readers is that Marvel seems more comfortable these days exploiting its older material in high-end book productions, which has led to books like the 30-plus-issues-full Fantastic Four Omnibus. Not only should that material remain in print, but ascribing value to these could be the first step -- of many, many, many steps -- in making things right with the creators.
 
posted 6:57 am PST | Permalink
 

 
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