• “By April 2023, when we finished writing this book, Marvel had made thirty-one feature films with a worldwide gross of over $28 billion. Considered as a whole, that output was easily the most successful film series of all time… But the story of Marvel Studios isn't one of inevitable ascent, not even in retrospect. The studio had to claw back the rights to characters that had been sold for quick hits of cash. When its parent company, Marvel Entertainment, established a heavy-handed Creative Committee to oversee the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel Studios had to fight for control of its own movies.” - intro

Stan Lee & the Tulip Mania of Comics

• Our true story starts in 1961, when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four comics to battle the fame of DC icons like Superman and Batman
• while 1961 marks the start of the marvel story we’re about to tell, Stan Lee had been working his way up through the company over the pat two decades as an office assistant
  • Doing everything from grabbing coffee/lunch for executives to filling the fountains of old ink pens→ over the next 3 decades, Marvel Comics and Stan Lee went on the produce classic superheroes such as Spider-Man & Iron Man & X-Men, sparking a tulip mania bubble in adult comics
• Stan Lee fun facts: started as an office assistant, filling ink for the pens to be dipped & grabbing lunch for people around the office
• Later would become the creative leader for 2 decades
• Unlike a lot of the existing comic book characters (batman, Superman, etc.) the Fantastic Four were portrayed in a different light, they were imperfect and more relatable (how so?)
  • Unlike the seemingly perfect personas of Batman and Superman, Stan Lee portrayed the fantastic 4 with financial struggles, relationship issues, and internal conflicts.
  • Let’s take Ben Grimm for example: Ben Grimm's transformation into The Thing, a rock-like creature with super strength, came with significant emotional and psychological struggles. He struggled with his physical appearance, feeling isolated and alienated from society. This struggle with self-acceptance and identity made him a highly relatable character for readers who may have experienced similar feelings of insecurity or being judged for their appearance.
  • This is one example among the other relatable characters— it attracted an older audience since they could relate
• Later he would introduce Spider-Man which widened the audience even more — angsty teen

The Burst of a Bubble

• In 1989 Ron Perelman, the billionaire who took over Revlon, wanted to get in on the action, so he bought Marvel and saddled it with $700m of debt (aka a gun to their head)
  • Perelman saw Marvel as a mini Disney and was ambitious to grow the company
  • Took the company public in 1991 and continued to grow
• The problem, however, was retailers doubled down too much on these hot comics, building their inventories way beyond real demand → by 1996 the bubble burst, 2/3rds of comic retailers went out of business, and Marvel Comics was filing for bankruptcy (we saw this play out with LEGO and their Star Wars / Harry Potter sets)

Ike Perlmutter Steps In to Acquire Marvel

• As Marvel was free-falling, Carl Icahn tried to take control by buying up the junk bonds but an unlikely man came in to acquire the company: Ike Perlmutter → having immigrated from Israel as a 24-year-old, Perlmutter eventually made his money arbitraging “other people’s mistakes”: “Perlmutter impressed his new in-laws enough that they gave him a substantial loan, which he invested in his business, Odd Lot Trading. Perlmutter would buy overstock merchandise for Odd Lot — anything from dolls to bars of soap — that was getting liquidated to clear out space in warehouses. He paid pennies on the dollar and then resold the goods at prices far below market value but far above what he had paid, turning those pennies into dimes and quarters. By the end of the 1970s, he had dozens of Odd Lot stores across New York City, each one a jumbled bazaar of discounted merchandise, with bright orange signs promising "Brand Names for Less." (One man’s trash is another man’s treasure…)
  • Icahn: buying debt in a company that wasn’t doing too well. If the company were to go bankrupt (which it did) then the debtors would have an argument to take ownership of the company in court
  • But Icahn didn’t own all the debt, other Wall Street banks did too
• Sold it for $117m and got into the Toy Biz, licensing the Batman character from DC and recruiting one of the best toy designers in the world, Avi Arad

Selling Off their Top IP to Escape Bankruptcy

• Crazy stories - to get out of their financial hole, Perlmutter tried to sell the Spider-Man rights in a package with James Cameron as director, Leo DiCaprio as Spider-Man, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Otto Octavius, but the deal got all webbed up in lawsuits!