comicbooksplus

I have recently found myself thinking at length about the various movies scheduled to be released based on Marvel Comics comic book characters; they are staggered to come out over a span of roughly a year, with the plan being to release the movies betwen 2010 and 2011.  There will be movies based on Marvel characters coming out between now and then, namely movies for the Punisher, the X-men’s Wolverine,  the X-Men Villain Magneto, and maybe even another Spiderman movie, however these films are all coming from different studios that bought the movie rights for these characters from Marvel (so Marvel effectively gave up control of these movies for the easy up-front cash).  The movies that I am reffereing to that are coming out in a couple of years are all being released as Marvel projects whuich means that Marvel paid/put their own money up front to have these movies made and released by various studios.  The difference here is that Marvel is assuming all of the risk: by puttingtheir own money up for these projects, they stand to reap most if not all of the rewards, or conversly, all of the debt for any movie that bombs.  If I recall correctly, the collateral for Marvel (who borrowed some of the money for these films) is the rights for some of their characters that would be relinquished to the lenders if Marvel can’t cover the debts.

The important thing here for fanboys like myself is that by doing things this way, Marvel retains creative control over their projects and can have a certain kind of synergy between their various film projects that lets them all work as part of some greater whole.  What I mean by this is simply that Marvel can now have all of their movies tie-in if they want to, and they want to! Anybody who saw last Summer’s mega successful Iron Man movie and stayed past the closing credits, was treated to a bonus scene that featured a character (played by one Samuel Jackson) called Nick Fury, Director of SHIELD.  This character made reference to the Avengers super hero team (called the Avengers Initiative here) - setting the stage for a future Avengers movie .  Soon afterwards, at the end of the Incredible Hulk movie
- also out this past Summer - Robert Downey Jr. re prised his Iron Man/Tony Stark role and made a reference to a group that he was putting together (a thinly veiled reference to the Avengers Initiative) .  By having such scenes in their movies, Marvel has started to get the ball rolling; they are laying the foundations for their future projects  - in such a way as to get the fans already buzzing about them.  As well, if you check out the deleted scenes from the recently released Hulk DVD, there was even a brief glimpse of the Captain America character trapped, frozen in the arctic ice.
That’s called very smart marketing, by the way.

So, with all of these films in pre-production by Marvel, I thought it would be appropriate to spend the next few posts  putting together a kind of Marvel Movie roadmap outlining what is already known about Marvel’s upcoming (self produced) movie releases.

Stay tuned, True Believer!