Thursday, February 12, 2015


So the news is out that Fantastic Four, the titled that launched the Marvel age of comics will be no more.  Now the reason the title is getting cancelled isn’t because the comic was selling so poorly that Marvel wasn’t making a profit, true book isn’t a top seller but because Marvel doesn’t want support FOX and their upcoming movies based on their characters.
 

For those who don’t know before Marvel Comics started producing their own films under Marvel Studios, they licensed their characters out to different film studios such as FOX and SONY.  Which isn’t unusual.  Many companies that work in one medium license out their proprieties to other companies that make products in a different medium. 

What was so unique about the deals MARVEL made with those studios.  The Studios get to keep the rights to make films with the characters they licensed from Marvel as long as they produced theatrical releases with-in a certain window of time from the last film based on those characters. This seemed like a good deal at the time, Marvel gets revenue from those films and hopefully exposure to their comics.  For a time it was a good deal that was until MARVEL started to make its own movies.

Now MARVEL is in an odd position while they profit from these movies, they would profit more if they could make those movies.  Also these the movies based on their characters from other film studios are now MARVEL’s competition.  Which many people expect is the reason Marvel not only cancelled the Fantastic Four but also told its creative teams to make no new X-Men characters and why they have killed off characters connected to X-Men and the Fantastic Four, such as Wolverine and Namor.  This is being seen as a way for Marvel to show their displeasure with FOX and the handling of their characters and a way to prevent new source material for FOX to use for further films. 

IF that theory is true then I must say that is a bad ideal on Marvels part. With over 50 years of stories FOX still has great well of stories that they can draw on.  Also they can always make new stories based the FF & X-MEN                maybe even add in characters they created that can be spun off into their own franchises.  Plus MARVEL loses out not just because they have one less money making title with cancelling of FF but are tying the hands of their creators by not allowing to create new characters connected to the x-men. 
All MARVEL can do is wait and hope that FOX stops making movies based on MARVEL characters.  Maybe they will just miss the deadline or a film bombs so badly that studio feels that not even rebooting them will work make a sequ