[LINK] "Marvel, Fox and the fantastic fracas"

[rfmcdonald]

MacLean's' Jaime Weinman describes an unfortunate, but plausible, rivalry between comic publisher and movie powerhouse Marvel and 20th century Fox.

It sometimes seems like the Marvel Comics characters from the 1960s are the driving force of the entire U.S. movie industry, what with Marvel Studios’ own films, the X-Men movies from 20th-Century Fox, and the Spider-Man franchise from Sony. Marvel probably wishes it could have the movie rights to all its characters, given how lucrative they are, but the company sold off a lot of those rights in the 1990s when business was bad. Would Marvel actively sabotage its own comics in order to deny free publicity to another studio’s movie? That’s what the comics gossip site Bleeding Cool claimed last week when it claimed that Marvel was planning to cancel its long-running Fantastic Four comic, and had already given orders to some artists to omit the Fantastic Four characters from promotional material. The reason? Marvel sold Fox the movie rights to Fantastic Four years ago, and the studio is going into production with a new, hip and edgy version of the four-person superhero team. Any promotion of Fantastic Four by Marvel will benefit Fox’s attempt to bring the team back to public attention, and make it harder for Marvel to get the film rights back (they revert to the owner if Fox goes long enough without using the characters). So, Bleeding Cool argued — and the Internet, being the Internet, instantly believed — Marvel might not think it’s worth its while to feature them too prominently.

Bleeding Cool sometimes gets inaccurate or only half-accurate scoops, but it’s one of the few sites that has any dirt at all on what goes on in the comic book industry (a business that is infamously cozy with a lot of the sites that report on it). While Fantastic Four may not be cancelled, the idea that it was at least in danger of cancellation was partly backed up by the less gossipy Comic Book Resources. That site checked with some sources and found that “a hiatus for the property is planned, at least as of recently. Plans can change, something that’s potentially more likely now that the situation has been made public.” In other words, the controversy might scare the company out of cancelling the book, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t on the table.

Whether that story turns out to be true or not, the report sparked enough interest that it began to call attention to other things going on with Marvel properties whose film rights are held by Fox. The X-Men comics, unlike the FF’s, are too popular to cancel. But fans of the X-Men books have been complaining that Marvel wasn’t doing very much promotion for the new movie, Days of Future Past, that X-Men characters were rarely at the centre of big company-wide promotions, and that there wasn’t much in the way of official tie-in merchandise for the film — the sort of thing that you normally expect is part of the very reason for doing a big blockbuster movie. (There is official Spider-Man movie merchandise, but that’s because Marvel bought back the merchandising rights several years ago.)