Sony Turned Down Offer to Buy All the Marvel Characters for Only $25 Million

Honestly, I'm surprised. If they were willing to invest in Spider-man I'm kinda surprised they never even considered the others.

If they were willing to make a Spiderman movie, they should've been all for an X-men and Hulk movie too. They're just as well known if not more. Hell I could see a 2000 Hulk film alone easily recouping that 25 million.

I'm really glad they didn't, but I think Sony was completely stupid for not jumping at it.
I'm too lazy to check but the problem might be that at that time Marvel already sold X-Men movie rights to Fox and Hulk movie rights to Universal.
 
Yep, that too. Of course, that's probably moot as long as the MCU/Sony deal lasts.

I replied to your posts over on my forum, by the way.
There is CGI Spider-Man film from Sony coming to theaters in December. So it looks like they can abandon movies and just release cartoon films from time to time and movie rights will not revert to Marvel.
 
It's easy to Monday morning QB this topic. As a dude who was born in the 80s and spent most of my childhood in the 90s and early 2000s, the only superheroes worth talking about were Batman, Superman, Spiderman and the X-Men.

Nobody cared about Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Black Panther, or Dr. Strange. People knew of them, but there wasn't this need for them. And nobody could've predicted the 10 year Marvel plan that actually ended up being the best thing to happen to comic book superheroes and the superhero genre of movies.
I cared, man.










I cared.
 
In hindsite with someone else running the ship... it's easy to say Sony f*cked up... but like Dragon said, they might of f*cked it up.

It certainly would've been a completely different set of heads working the characters... & so I feel we are blessed that it went down how it did.

Now if only DC could've gotten into the right hands :oops:

They would have done nothing but fuck those characters up. Sony could have saved us all from a decade of comic book movies though. Bomb after bomb would have killed the genre.
 
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There was an article with Bob Iger where it sounds like there's hope for franchises where it's commonly known that the movie would be R rated like Deadpool. I think Disney doesn't want to create a new R rated IP, and have fans mistakenly bring their young kids to watch.
I believe it's called marvel R, they're going to keep producing these films under that banner.
 
Not as bad as Blockbuster passing on an opportunity to purchase Netflix (which would then go on to put them out of business).

If it was in the Mid 2000s that would have been a major blow, but in 1998 like you said we were still a decade away before the Marvel characters started to blow up. Though I wonder how things would have ended up had Sony purchased them.
Sexually appealing avatar.
 
Basically the equivalent of botching The Louisiana Purchase.

Not quite. A lot of the rights were sold and enough of the movies sucked that Marvel was able to get many of the rights back. Marvel was just smart enough to see that there was something there to movies that everyone else kind of gave up on.

For your analogy to work, it would have been like the French selling the Louisiana purchase to some other country and that country basically saying "Fuck, this. There is nothing here. We will let USA have it."
 
Lots of people cared about the Avengers. A friend of mine worked in a comic book store in the late 80s early90s and Thor and Iron Man had a fair size and ollowing.
only among comic nerds. Even the X-men was not widely recognized until the TV cartoon. Casuals only knew about Batman, the Hulk, Spiderman and Superman. Before Disney bought Marvel, the Avengers was not a premier title- it was considered a lower tier than Fantastic Four. X-men and its spinoffs reigned supreme during the late 80s and 90s and everything else took a backseat.

20 years later now look at it. Disney turned the Avengers into a behemoth A-list franchise that crushes the opposition. They even made hits out of Ant-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy. It truly is astonishing what they've done.

While Sony and Fox couldnt even make a decent movie with properties like Dark Phoenix, Silver Surfer and Galactus. They would have fucked up any title they got.
 
For those wondering Disney has already produced R-rated films. Touchstone Pictures for instance is a label under Disney Studios. Censorship isn't an issue here.
 
Not quite. A lot of the rights were sold and enough of the movies sucked that Marvel was able to get many of the rights back. Marvel was just smart enough to see that there was something there to movies that everyone else kind of gave up on.

For your analogy to work, it would have been like the French selling the Louisiana purchase to some other country and that country basically saying "Fuck, this. There is nothing here. We will let USA have it."

Actually, my analogy works because, if Jefferson had passed on the Louisiana Purchase, he would have botched it... in the fashion that Sony let Marvel properties on the shelf.
 
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