There’s more to come, too, with two other big-budget Marvel movies hitting theaters by summer. “X-Men 2,” the sequel to the surprise 2000 hit, arrives in May, followed by “The Hulk” in June. Both films are expected to build on the success of “Spider-Man,” which grossed $822 million and sparked sales of nearly 2 million Spidey videogames. The movie helped push the revenue of Marvel and its publishing, licensing and toy divisions to $290 million last year, up from $181 million in 2001. Marvel’s stock, trading near $4 last fall, is now above $10. “Things are fantastic,” crows Marvel Enterprises CEO Allen Lipson. “I don’t think they could get much better.”
Lipson can be forgiven for sounding like Peter Parker after a hot date with Mary Jane. Marvel’s mid-’90s collapse was so spectacular, you’d think its rivals at DC Comics had slipped it some kryptonite. Under Ron Perelman, who bought the company in 1989, Marvel tried to become a hulking corporate titan, expanding into businesses like trading cards, toys and stickers. It even explored funding its own movies. For a time, the strategy worked. But after the comic-book craze ended, the company bled red ink. Its best creators left in droves, and loyal fans were furious that their beloved icons were sliding into lame soap-opera story lines.
After a protracted battle between Perelman and corporate raider Carl Icahn, Toy Biz owner Ike Perlmutter managed to take Marvel out of bankruptcy in 1998. And Perlmutter assembled his own Fantastic Four to run Marvel: the then CEO Peter Cuneo, 58, chief operating officer Bill Jemas, 45, Marvel Comics Editor in Chief Joe Quesada, 41, and Avi Arad, 55, who would head the film and TV division, Marvel Studios. The new Marvel, they decided, would be an intellectual-property company, licensing its characters for movies, videogames, toys and more, rather than risking massive capital investments of its own.
Their first job, however, was to fix the core publishing division, whose market share had fallen from 70 percent in the early ’90s to 33 percent in 2000. Marvel cut the number of titles in half to focus on quality. And it lured back top writers and artists to modernize characters like Spider-Man, making him a teenager once more and ratcheting up the emotional realism.
With significant advances in visual effects and 3-D graphics, moviemaking and videogame technology were able to do real justice to the superheroes’ abilities, too. In 1998, “Blade,” starring Wesley Snipes, grossed $70 million. Two years later, “X-Men” hauled in $157 million at the box office, proving the success of “Blade” wasn’t a fluke. As “X-Men” arrived in theaters, videogame publisher Activision released its first 3-D X-Men and Spider-Man games for the original PlayStation, and both were hits, erasing a string of superhero videogames that failed because of lackluster 2-D graphics. “We discovered that hardcore gamers were also comic-book fans,” says Kathy Vrabeck, an executive VP at Activision. As each movie and game became more successful, Arad and Lipson used their new clout to demand–and get–a bigger share of the box-office receipts on movies like “Spider-Man” and “The Hulk.” Now the popular movies and games draw new readers to the comics.
The Daredevil character is known as The Man Without Fear, and Marvel is also plunging ahead, seemingly fearless of superhero saturation. But “X-Men” producer Lauren Shuler Donner says she is concerned that the sheer number of Marvel projects–12 new movie franchises and TV shows have been announced–might be too much for even the biggest comic geeks. And Gale Anne Hurd, a producer of “The Hulk,’’ points to the Batman franchise as an example of how a couple of bad movies can hurt a genre. “When a couple of them fail, they say that the genre doesn’t work anymore,” she says. But Marvel Studios chief Arad sees his deep bench of characters as an inexhaustible resource, with action, horror, espionage, sci-fi and other genres ready to be tapped. “The world is realizing that comics are good literature,” says Arad. “We at Marvel have characters that have endured 60 years. That’s hard to do.” True, but one thing faster than a superhero is the life cycle of movie fad.
