Mind boggling numbers. A ting independent studio that Disney bought 10 years ago for 4 billion dollars now grosses more than Warner Bros Paramount, Lionsgate and Universal combined, despite only releasing 3 movies a year.
shareMarvel Studios already crossed $22 billion worldwide
shareDisney made one of the shrewdest investments in snatching up Marvel.
I'm still intrigued as to how this deal will reap these gargantuan rewards going forward. No one could have predicted the amounts that Marvel films would be making and I don't really see how this rapid Box Office growth can be maintained. Each successive movie can't possibly out-gross the previous and there can't be this expectation that every single Marvel film has to be a $1 Billion film to be deemed successful.
I don't think Ant-Man or even the Thor films as part of phase one movies are bad because they didn't reach the $1 Billion dollar status. Marvel has to go small even as they expand their reach into Cosmic stories. They have to continually invest in characters even when audiences want and sometimes demand spectacle.
I guess that explains stuff like Black Widow or Shang-Chi, or even Blade being rebooted. Just to even things out.
shareWhen Marvel first sought financing for their little project, Shang-chi was part of the initial pitch. I believe Marvel structured their plan based on big ticket films of $175 Mil and then smaller films with a modest budget. I think $575 Million was the request of Merryl Lynch against all of their IP as collateral if they failed to repay the loan?
Disney saw the $$$ from Iron Man and the rest is history. Bottom line though was that small character based films was the norm. After the uber success of The Avengers Feige changed everything to the point of having an in studio management disagreement over the ballooning cost of Civil War, which I believe Perlmutter totally disagreed with and balked at. I don't believe Perlmutter was wrong though as this path is truly unsustainable and can only be accomplished one time.