This afternoon, Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood posted a press release announcing that Disney has paid Paramount Pictures to transfer marketing and distribution rights for Marvel Studio's The Avengers and Iron Man 3 over to Walt Disney Studios for the reasonable-sounding-to-this-layman sum of $115 million. Paramount will retain Thor and Captain America. Without being any kind of insider, the specifics of this deal seem to hinge on the simple fact that Thor and Captain America are already in production, while Avengers and Iron Man 3 are more or less hypothetical at this stage. Paramount also retains the rights to the first two Iron Man films.
This seems like a move that was only a matter of time. Marvel was attractive to Disney in the first place almost entirely as a tentpole film generator, so it is only natural that they would start trying to pull all the rights they could back under their umbrella wherever possible. $115 million is a bargain when you consider the long-term potential.
Of course, there are still a lot of properties that Marvel sold off back before it was its own studio, and somehow buying them back would be a prohibitively pricey proposition. The companies that own those options now need only to keep exercising them to avoid losing them. It is very unlikely that you'll ever see Wolverine join the movie Avengers. (See? He can't be everywhere at once.) Any talk you hear of Fantastic Four or Daredevil reboots has as much to do with holding onto the rights as anything else. Columbia just put hot property Ghost Rider 2 into production for this very reason.
Luckily, the rights to The Punisher did just revert back to Marvel. Lionsgate didn't hang onto those for some reason.
Interesting, no? Speculate away, industry watchers!
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Nice Wolvie joke.
Now what Marvel needs to do is hire Jor Carnahan to do a Punisher movie that won’t make me want to punish the filmmakers.
lol, I second the praise for the Wolverine joke.
I feel that all the "Disney owns Marvel" jokes have been done to death… But here goes…
Is Mickey Mouse gonna be in the Avengers movie or are they just gonna be satisfied with a big musical number? …Hello? This thing on?
don’t forget Donald Duck and Goofy as back up members of the Avengers and Uncle Scrooge Mcduck as the playboy millionaire superhero.
So chances are if they remake Daredevil it’ll be about retaining the rights, thus, making another shitty version of some of comics’ greatness stories. GREAT!
Speaking of Disney and Marvel…….has anyone seen the Tron variants for Marvel for November?
The Spider-Man variant looks very similar (if not exact) to his new costume design for ‘Big Time’. I wonder…
yeah, the captain america tron design is one of the wrong things i’ve seen in a while
The only thing about this that surprises me is that they’re still planning Iron Man 3, which is good news.
@edward: Yeah I had the same reaction too.
"Spidey looks cool…..Iron Man is kicking ass!….Captain Americ—Eww…."
Maybe a Wolverine Skrull could still show up in the Avengers.
$115 million? is there not much money is marketing and distributing? does paramount not make much money after a film is released?
The wolverine Tron cover looked baller
The real question is who owns the film rights to Howard the Duck?
Well Disney would buy the rights to Ghost Rider but they are waiting for Chris Evans to finishing filming the Avengers movie so he can play Johnny Blaze.