Why Are There So Many Spider-Man Movies?

[ADVAY]: Hey everyone, Advay here again, and it's Thursday, July 30th. Today, me and my uncle Nishant Mama are going to see Spider-Man: Brand New Day. I'm really excited. But Nishant Mama told me something before we left that kind of blew my mind: the company that created Spider-Man almost lost him forever because they went broke, and when they sold him, they were offered $25 million for basically every Marvel character, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Black Panther, all of them. Sony said no. They said nobody cares about those other characters and just bought Spider-Man for $7 million. Those "other characters" became the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has made over $30 billion. So Nishant Mama looked into the whole story, and it's wild.

[NISHANT]: So yeah, before we head to the theater, I want to tell you the story of how Marvel went bankrupt, sold Spider-Man for the price of a nice house in the Bay Area, and then built the most successful film franchise in history using the characters that nobody else wanted. In the early 1990s, Marvel wasn't a film studio. It was a comic book company, and business was booming because of a speculator bubble. Collectors were buying comics not to read them but to flip them, treating first editions and variant covers like investment assets. When that bubble burst, and bubbles always burst, Marvel's sales cratered. Debt piled up. The stock fell from $35 a share to $2.38 in three years, and by December 1996, Marvel Entertainment filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. More than a third of the staff was laid off.

To raise cash, Marvel started selling the film rights to its most popular characters. Spider-Man went to Sony. The X-Men went to 20th Century Fox. The Fantastic Four went to Fox. Blade went to New Line Cinema for a flat fee so small that when the 1998 Blade movie grossed $131 million worldwide, Marvel walked away with roughly $25,000. Twenty five thousand dollars from a $131 million movie.

The Spider-Man deal is the one that defines the era. In 1998, Sony executive Yair Landau approached Marvel's chairman Ike Perlmutter about buying Spider-Man's film rights. Perlmutter, desperate for cash, made a counteroffer that in hindsight might be the worst deal ever proposed in entertainment history: he offered Landau the film rights to nearly every Marvel character still available, including Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Black Panther, and Ant-Man, for $25 million total. Landau took the offer back to Sony's leadership, and their response, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, was: "Nobody gives a shit about any of the other Marvel characters. Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man." Sony paid $7 million for Spider-Man alone. Marvel would receive 5 percent of movie revenue and a 50/50 split on merchandising. The characters Sony didn't want turned out to be worth more than everything Sony bought.

After emerging from bankruptcy, Marvel realized that licensing characters to other studios meant watching someone else make billions from properties it created while receiving pennies on the dollar. The first Spider-Man trilogy grossed over $1.6 billion at the box office. Marvel's cut was roughly $62 million. Sony kept the rest.

In 2005, Marvel made a decision that changed the entertainment industry permanently: instead of licensing characters to other studios, it would make its own movies. The company secured a $525 million credit facility from Merrill Lynch, putting up the film rights to ten characters as collateral, including Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor. These were the B-list characters that no studio had been willing to buy. If the movies failed, Marvel would lose the characters. If they succeeded, Marvel would keep all the profit instead of taking 5 percent.

Iron Man came out in 2008 with Robert Downey Jr., an actor who was considered a risk because of his history with substance abuse. The movie grossed $585 million worldwide. A year later, Disney bought Marvel for $4.24 billion, which at the time seemed like an enormous price and now looks like one of the greatest acquisitions in corporate history. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, the MCU, has since grossed over $30 billion at the global box office, built entirely on characters that Sony was offered for $25 million and dismissed as worthless. The reason there have been three different actors playing Spider-Man in twenty years, Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland, isn't just creative restlessness. It's a contract clause.

Sony's deal with Marvel includes a provision that requires Sony to begin production on a new Spider-Man film within a certain number of years, typically reported as every five years and nine months, or the film rights revert back to Marvel. This is a use-it-or-lose-it clause, and it's the reason Sony has never let Spider-Man sit dormant even when the creative direction was uncertain. When Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 underperformed in 2007, Sony didn't take a decade off to rethink the character. They rebooted with Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spider-Man in 2012 because the clock was ticking. When The Amazing Spider-Man 2 disappointed in 2014, Sony struck a deal with Marvel Studios to share the character, bringing Tom Holland into the MCU while Sony retained the film rights and kept the clock from running out.

The movie we're going to see today, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, exists in part because of that clause. Sony has to keep making Spider-Man films or lose the most valuable superhero franchise they own, a franchise they bought for $7 million that has since generated over $9 billion in global box office revenue. Every Spider-Man movie Sony releases is both a creative project and a legal obligation, a film designed to entertain audiences and a contractual move designed to prevent a $9 billion asset from reverting to a competitor.

Marvel, for its part, has spent two decades building an empire from the characters nobody wanted while watching its most popular creation generate billions for someone else. The MCU exists because Sony said "nobody gives a shit about Iron Man." The irony is that Spider-Man, the character Sony paid $7 million to own, is now most successful when he appears in MCU films that Marvel Studios co-produces, because the audience connection to the broader universe is what gives the character his current cultural weight. Sony owns Spider-Man's film rights. Marvel owns the universe that makes Spider-Man matter. And neither can fully succeed without the other, which is why two companies that should be competitors have spent the last decade figuring out how to share. The thing I keep thinking about is that Sony exec's quote: "Nobody gives a shit about any of the other Marvel characters." That sentence might be the most expensive miscalculation in entertainment history. The characters nobody wanted have generated over $30 billion at the box office, turned Disney's $4.24 billion acquisition into one of the best deals in corporate history, and redefined what a movie franchise can be. Meanwhile, the character Sony paid $7 million for has become most valuable when he's borrowed back by the company that sold him. We're going to go see Brand New Day now, and I'll be watching it knowing that every frame exists partly because a contract says Sony has to keep making Spider-Man movies or give him back to the people who created him. Enjoy the movie, Advay.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.