Disney/Marvel

How much is Disney to blame for the current treatment of Marvel characters in comics?

I know there's always been that merchandise embargo on X-men and F4 characters but at least they had comics... until now. The F4 practically gone and the X-men are being pushed out the backdoor.

But Marvel comics are shafting franchises that bring them money. And yet they are getting all the blame it seems. But why would they do that? They make the comics and the success from the movies only give them boosts here and there.

So who would gain more overall from focusing on movie franchises over the consistently strong performing franchises?

And do you think Disney will keep forcing changes at the expense of the comics?

I was just in an urgentcare waiting room and this little girl was playing on what i can only assume is the emergency phone.. when her dad asked who she was talking to, she said "spider-girl"
when he said 'whoever that is' she said "spider-man's girlfriend!"
when the hilarious dumb shit kids spout is actually no more fucked up than the reality of what's published, it's time to just end the entire medium and start over in 10 years

>How much is Disney to blame for the current treatment of Marvel characters in comics?

None

>I know there's always been that merchandise embargo on X-men and F4 characters but at least they had comics... until now. The F4 practically gone and the X-men are being pushed out the backdoor.

That's all Marvel's decision

>So who would gain more overall from focusing on movie franchises over the consistently strong performing franchises?

Not Marvel comics, but they keep acting like they do.

>>I know there's always been that merchandise embargo on X-men and F4 characters but at least they had comics... until now. The F4 practically gone and the X-men are being pushed out the backdoor.
>
>That's all Marvel's decision
bullshit

Exactly, they've been pretty stingy on the merchandise but still used the characters extensively in the comics. But now that's not even the case and they're getting trampled by DC. Because DC knows who their most popular characters are and are giving people what they want.

Marvel isn't and that's like committing suicide. And this is something comics don't do. You think they would willingly abandon their cash cows? To help the movies?

You really think business-minded Disney would be behind a decision that would undermine profits from one of their most popular franchises? A franchise that constantly sells issues, and keeps putting cash in their pocket despite the fact that someone else has the film liscence?

You really think current Marvel wouldn't make a decision that stupid?

>A franchise that constantly sells issues, and keeps putting cash in their pocket

>Disney
>Having anything to do with the comics
>not just the movies

I doubt it.

Do you think Warner Brothers polices DC comics too?

Well, there are people who think WB was the cause of the reboot, so...

Not that guy, but there is little money in comics. Disney bought Marvel so they could have the MCU, they don't give a shit about the profits of the comics. Disney is a progressive company and I think comics are the sacrificial lamb slaughtered upon the altar of liberal ideology.

>Disney is a progressive company

It's because of the movies that the comics are so shit, by the movies being such a hit with young girls Marvel have decided to change their comic books to reflect that....and they aren't good at it. Regardless of if Disney themselves have any creative control over the comics, the Disney buyout and the mainstream cocksucking that was the result of it certainly has had an adverse effect on Marvel comics as a brand and as a whole

Are you asking if Disney would mandate changes to the comics to better promote upcoming movies?

Do you know which makes them more money?

WB seems to have a very hands off approach to DC and just lets them do what they want and makes movies and games off the characters. You can argue the Vertigo thing or some other stuff but DC seems to be in control over their comics.

I believe Disney just goes "Make us _________ amount of money, or else we close you down" and that's why Marvel is cranking up the gimmicks.

The Movies make them more money, so that's why Disney would focus their attention on the films.

It's Marvel itself that has this stupid idea that there needs to be similarities between the Comics and Films, because why else would people want to see the Avengers unless they read the comics?

Disney and Marvel Studios don't give a shit about the comics.

It's Marvel that desperately tries to bring in MCU fans to read the comics and failing.

But why dump the F4 and kill off the X-men when they are guaranteed money makers? Even with the F4 getting hijacked with Hickman and forcing Robinson to work on a forgettable run pulled better numbers than many of the comics that Marvel has relaunched multiple times.

There's forcing movie synergy and then there's self sabotage to help a sector outside of your own. Marvel comics have gone from the former to the latter these last couple years.

Disney most certainly ruined Marvel animation. We downgraded from World's Mightiest Heroes to Avengers Assemble, Spectacular Spidey downgraded to Ultimate. Everything else has been a shit show as well, with no end in sight.

WB has owned DC for decades, they're very hands off with the actual comics.

Disney owns Marvel, my dude. There's not a decision that Marvel can make that Disney can't force or veto.

do you think Disney will eventually sell off Marvel, the same way they let Saban buy back Power Rangers? If so, how long will it take? in 10 years or so when the MCU has either ended or will be on it's last legs? or do you think they'll try a Marvel movie reboot first?

At its worse, Marvel is still good for its IPs. Disney will still have movies made. The MCU will come to an end just so they can focus on franchise series in their own worlds.

The MCU is really just action blockbusters but with previously established characters. That's the real key outside of them being safe and enjoyable for families. When you have long running franchises, you have to pay the actors more and more money. But when you keep them to trilogies, you can reap the rewards and limit growing contracts.

As for the comics, it's really down to how Star Wars does. If that franchise expands and continues to be successful as the movies do the same, you can bet Disney will move more of the top talent from Marvel to that.

Someone needs to find that excerpt from Marvel The Untold Story about how Perlmutter ordered "Stan Lee Presents" to be removed from the books.

Honestly? Not much, if at all. Disney doesn't really give two tugs of a dead dog's dick what Marvel Entertainment does as long as they don't waste a lot of money. It's the now-separate Marvel Studios (and, to a lesser extent, the Marvel Television division that's still part of Marvel Entertainment) that Disney cares about. Marvel Comics exists primarily to retain and create IPs that Marvel Studios and Marvel Television can make money off of.

So you're saying Disney signed off on Marvel killing Hulk, and turning Captain America into a Nazi?

Marvel has more control over it's properties than you think, man.

Well Banner isn't the Hulk anymore and his film rights are messy. Also, making Cap a Nazi was just Marvel doing it's other policy of making people mad.

But promoting Inhumans over the X-men? Dismantling the Fantastic 4? Sounds like stuff that serves the interest of the movies and not the comics.

True, but Disney didn't make that call, and Marvel's comics division still believes that ticket sales = Comic sales.

Also, Perlmutter is a petty fuck who holds a grudge against Fox.

Marvel isn't dumb enough to drop franchises. That's the thing. We are talking about the X-Men, they got more iconic characters than the rest of Marvel outside of that. And even the battered housewife fans known as Xfags have bought what they can of their franchise.

Theory: X-men will lose their powers and get them back with terrigen mists, making them Inhumans to help promote the name while using popular X-characters.

But that's assuming Marvel is making lemonade out of lemons because the Inhumans have been selling like shit and that X pulls in sales. I don't even know if my theory would work out that well.

Let me break it down for you retards that think Disney has "nothing" to do with it.

>Buy recognizable but failing company
>reorient that company to appeal to your customers
>fans of said company are confused why you arent appealing to them instead even though they didnt support the company enough so it had to sell

Its not that fucking hard. Disney bought the IP to make comics for Disney's demographics.

>this thread again

This. Its really not that hard. When a company buys another company they pull it in line with their company goals and want to appeal to their companies demographic. Not the demographic that made the company they purchased bankrupt.

DELETE THIS

>Marvel isn't dumb enough to drop franchises

This is the same company that made an ongoing out of killing their portfolio of young heroes for shock value. They just killed another one of the Runaways after they got confirmation that a Hulu show is coming out.

But then why didn't Marvel make any original Disney comics starring their most popular IPs instead of reprinting stuff other companies put out?

Sure they're making original stuff based on the rides and Tsum Tsum, but IDW and Boom are the ones handling the Mickey Mouse comics.
.

There's no embargo. FOX doesn't want to produce toys of their own movies because they haven't ever really been popular enough to warrant it. It's easier to just throw that development cost at the Simpsons or Family Guy and reap the rewards.

Marvel sells a variety of current FF and X-Men merch right off their own website store, including the "season 1" introductory GN they produced just a few years ago, a $1,000 Simone Bianchi print featuring Doctor Doom, Iron Man, Captain America and Thor, a $1,300 Alex Ross print featuring the classic X-Men teams, a $1,500 Alex Ross "Secret Wars" print featuring the Avengers, Fantastic Four, and X-Men together, and a $1,000 Silver Surfer print by Gabriele Dell' Otto, and a variety of more budget-level prints featuring the X-Men and Wolverine, as well as a Wolverine "Mr Potato Head" toy.

That's just from their own site. When you go to Amazon, there are 54 results in refrigerator magnets alone, excluding all "used" item sales. Obviously some of those may not be this year's products, but an embargo would mean Disney/Marvel actively withdrawing these items from sale for breach of their licensing conditions.

There is no embargo. FF and X-Men merch is still, clearly, very available, including from Marvel's own generally fairly thin online store offering. Stop sucking yourselves off for five goddamn minutes and look up.

This isn't the 90s, Marvel wasn't going bankrupt. Disney just came by with a fat sack of cash, promised to help them with their movies and merchandise.

You know when Marvel started making less money and losing to DC? Now. Who's been buying more of DC than Marvel? That demographic that supposedly stopped by comics.

This is why people are saying DC is saving comics, because they are showing that sticking to your strengths and focusing on putting out comics people want is the real key to success.

>This is the same company that made an ongoing out of killing their portfolio of young heroes for shock value. They just killed another one of the Runaways after they got confirmation that a Hulu show is coming out.

Marvel has a long history of shafting their teen and sidekick characters.

Because Marvel bought the company for the IPs. They are just taking those popular IPs and making them fall in line with who their company has always appealed to. Do you know what a mission statement is? These workers have Disney's mission statement in their cubicles not Marvels.

Why the living fuck would Disney care about the comics? Nobody even reads those outside of the people who already were.

All the "synergy" shit is solely because of the comics branch

Disney bought Marvel because they wanted to get money from the demographics that Marvel was already making money in, not because they wanted to turn Marvel into a clone of Disney. In particular, they wanted Marvel Studios, because they caught lightning in a bottle with the first Iron Man film, and Disney wanted to board that money train before Marvel made a shit-ton of money without them (and as The Avengers proved, it was a very prudent investment). Disney couldn't care less about what the rest of their purchase does as long as they don't poison the brand for movie-goers and merch-buyers.

Well no shit when your parent company redefines the characters for a new demographic you dont ignore it. Its implied you change it and appeal to those people.

You are dumb as a motherfucker and an unemployed NEET who has never worked in the business world if you dont think the President of the parent company is constantly dictating what the subsidiary does.

Yeah but that doesn't mean Disney is actually mandating the stuff that the comics are doing. And honestly, I don't even think they notice or care.

If they did, we probably would have had Miles Morales in the MCU right now

But if they believe that ticket sales and comic sales are linked even in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, why would they kill off any characters who were getting movies? Sales of the comics would be through the fucking roof if movie audiences actually gave a shit about them. It wouldn't matter who made those movies, because you'd still be getting 2 million readers on a single title.

>X-men will lose their powers and get them back with terrigen mists, making them Inhumans to help promote the name while using popular X-characters

Why tho? It flies in the face of the logic people are claiming here. Why would you confuse the issue of who owns the rights to what and potentially open up your Inhumans franchise to protracted legal action from FOX like that? Especially when you nominally have a movie planned and have already featured Inhumans as a concept in your tv shows? How does using "popular" X-Men characters who can't even top the charts in their solo books help the Inhumans, who are usually team-based, where these individual X-Men would just be wallpaper unless the book was secretly about them?

Wouldn't it make more sense to believe that Deadpool was going to be on the Inhumans from now on, in that case, since he's both part of the X-Men package and by far and away the most popular short of, possibly, Wolverine?

Why would they? Marvel Entertainment didn't make much money beyond movies and toys when Disney bought them, and they don't do so now. Marvel Entertainment exists now just to provide IPs that Marvel Studios can use and toy companies can license, because that, not comic books, is where the real money is.

Kek you cant be fucking stupid enough to think Miles is more popular than Peter. Stay delusional mate. Keep just sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming nuh uh. Maybe you should actually work for a major company and see how they operate interally cause you are very mistaken if you think a subsidiary has any control whatsoever. The parent company dictates everything. Sure not the day to day but the overall goal and message being portrayed very much so.

>nothing in stores or advertised on television
>have to go on the internet to find obscure little trinkets

Oh boy, magnets! You really proved your point!

Same reason why there's a female Thor and a black Captain America. The name. If people start buying Inhuman comics and caring about the franchise, regardless of the characters used in them, then you have a fanbase ready for the movies. Name recognition is a huge thing in media. This is why you get sequels and names attached whenever it can be done.

But this doesn't work for Marvel comics, it's actually hurting them. It helps the movies.

>There's no embargo. FOX doesn't want to produce toys of their own movies because they haven't ever really been popular enough to warrant it.

They DO want to, they're just limited to making tie-ins with food. That's why they had those Carl's Jr, Dennys and Crush promotions for X-men and Fant4stic.

Also, there is an embargo. It started in late 2014 for FF and early 2015 for X-men. The Contest of Champions mobile game is proof, because it came out in the winter of 2014 with X-men characters, but no FF ones.

Since then, neither franchise has been allowed in any Marvel cartoon or vidya. Avengers Assemble and Ultimate Spider-man both had characters from both franchises appear on the show, but after 2014, they are never mentioned again.

Then there's the thing with the Secret Wars t-shirts.

>FF and X-Men merch is still, clearly, very available

And yet I still can't buy the Fantastic Four expansion for Legendary without paying a scalper a 1500% mark-up. Huh, weird.

Because they own them? See . I swear its like half of you have never worked for a fortune 500 company before.

Disney actually likes to make money, so no.

I owned all the original New Mutants issues as a kid simply because I was happy to start from a #1. I hadn't even heard of the New Mutants at the time, because I was just a stupid kid.

I thought Deadpool was Spider-Man turned evil.

Kids have imagination. Getting angry over that is really pathetic dude.

>This is why people are saying DC is saving comics

People are saying this because they've been so used to seeing the Diamond direct sales figures for decades that they don't understand how DC's new publishing model works.

The figures that DC is "selling" are not representative of final sales, they're part of a model that overproduces, sends the copies out to retailers based on what the retailers are prepared to try and sell, and takes a deposit for every copy from the retailer. When the unsold copies go to pulp either at the end of the cover-date period or a prearranged time after delivery, the retailer isn't left with the unsold copies, the publisher keeps a fraction of the deposit to cover admin, returns the rest to the retailer, and the unsold stuff (in the case of magazines) goes to be recycled, for which the publisher receives the worth of the material being recycled.

It's no better or worse cost-wise than direct sales; most periodicals are sold on sale-or-return, because obviously most retailers don't want stockrooms full of unsold copies of Cosmo or Modern Home or The New York Times, since they'd very quickly run out of space even with modest wastage on each order.

What typically happens is that at the end of the year, the publisher prints an average sales figure in each title, which gives the monthly (or whatever period) number of actual sales across that year as a mean average, rather than the number of copies printed. Three months into a big sale-or-return relaunch, you obviously can't find those figures.

Why would they bother dictating orders when Marvel Entertainment doesn't bring in or lose much money regardless of what they do? Movies and merchandise licensing is where the money is, the comics are just a loss-leader to provide material that the movies and toymakers can sell to the public. If they actually make money (unlikely, given the state of the industry after the '90s), that's just a nice bonus. Marvel Comics' entire job is to provide and retain IPs, and to not poison their brands such that Marvel Studios loses money. Beyond that, there's no reason for Disney to give half a shit what Marvel Entertainment does.

And what about public reception? If people are swapping Marvel pulls for DC, that should also be taken into account.

And we've seen when a LCS buys DC comics and they don't sell during the Convergence/DCYou fiasco. But we're not only hearing about shops buying more because they're selling the comics but also the calls for more printings as well.

I don't expect DC to keep dominating to this degree but their focus is helping them stay on top. This actually something Marvel used to do a lot of, double shipping and multiple titles on the most popular character. That was Spider-man before OMD/OMIT.

They own them. You sound like a child. Go look up how any business operates. You dont oversee the day to day but you dictate the company's mission and goals. Thats how it works. You sound insanely dumb.

They're not limited at all other than to using the film versions of the characters, which obviously don't sell in one case and they've never really exploited with action figures in the other.

The reason they do it with food is to promote the movies. But they don't have movies out now - so, as with all the other stuff they made to promote those movies, including the FF stuff from last year, it's not on sale.

>after 2014

until the next time they are.

>I can't find expansions for a card game without paying a markup

IT'S ALMOST AS IF IT'S INTENTIONALLY RARE

LIKE YOU KNOW CARD GAMES AND SHIT

fuck's sake user lern2

>Oh boy, magnets! You really proved your point!

Yeah, I really did. Amazon is the world's largest retailer. There's over 353 thousand results for new Fantastic Four items there. 54 of them are magnets, because they're fucking ubiquitous.

Seriously, is this just some retarded troll-game where you guys are out for replies? Because you do know that Cred Forums is just you, me, and Joey Q, right? And I mean, if you and Joey are fucking with me, sure, but... what does that make you?

> If people start buying Inhuman comics and caring about the franchise, regardless of the characters used in them, then you have a fanbase ready for the movies

Only if you sell literally millions of copies of each issue. On present evidence you'd make what, $8.50 a ticket over the lifetime of a run? So you'd either need to put that up to $20 a ticket to add a million dollars to the gross, or, you know, get realistic about how small the comic book audience actually is?

>How much is Disney to blame for the current treatment of Marvel characters in comics?
Almost 0. Perlmutter is to blame, not Disney.

Disney's goals for Marvel are to make money in ways that Marvel does that Disney otherwise doesn't (namely, the young male demographic, which was largely untapped by the company before 2009). It makes no fiscal sense for Disney to tell them to drop everything they're doing and aim for the demographics that Disney already had a lock on.

Well shit I guess Amazon is the go-to place for F4 products! Also, have you looked up other characters for Marvel? Surprisingly X-men is pretty low.

Still, your argument is shit and you are coming up with excuses for a blatant issue with merchandising. I'm sure you could argue the sky not being blue.

>If people are swapping Marvel pulls for DC, that should also be taken into account.

August 2015 Marvel sold 2,620,489 comic books in the Diamond Top 300. (40.13% of 6.53m copies)

August 2016 they sold 3,005,496 comic books in the Diamond Top 300. (32.11% of 9.63m copies)

With Marvel, Diamond's figures still represent final sales to retailers - Marvel has made that money, the retailers have paid their discounted cover price and sell on what they can to consumers. With DC, unsold copies are returned (actually, pulped without returning to the publisher, but only because that's cheaper logistically speaking).

If anything it seems like DC's big push has helped Marvel, because for most of this year they've been down on the same month from 2015. Whereas at some point in the next 12 months DC is going to have to publish real data - because retailers want to see it - on what they can actually expect to sell per-issue in the average 12 month period. This helps both publisher and retailer finesse the printing process.

My guess? DC's gonna go back to direct and accept the "hit" to "sales", but actually be better off financially for having done so. Their costs right now could well be ruining them.

We'll see.

>I guess Amazon is the go-to place for F4 products

it's the go-to place for everything, grandpa

> a blatant issue with merchandising

You know why I wouldn't make an FF toyline right now?

Same reason I wouldn't have made a Green Lantern toyline in 2014.

Somebody closed that door.

Yes it does because that demo makes money. And it wasnt "drop everything". Disney bought them years ago and have slowly been moving them in that direction. You dont appeal to a demo that made the company you bought go bankrupt. They purchased a recognizable IP which failed miserably financially. How new are you to comics?

>until the next time they are

After almost two years?

Like there was some sort of embargo keeping them from producing anything for that stretch of time?

>IT'S ALMOST AS IF IT'S INTENTIONALLY RARE

>LIKE YOU KNOW CARD GAMES AND SHIT

They're not sold in packs. They're sold in boxes in a complete set.

Out of the ten boxes they've put out, it's the ONLY set that has that problem.

>There's over 353 thousand results for new Fantastic Four items there

>on Amazon

Which are all old toys and merch sold by third parties.

>idiots trying to blame the mouse for marvel sjw shit
I can't wait til Disney actually put a profit driven suit in charge, they are your only saviour.

And I'm telling you that Marvel Studios is what they've always wanted out of Marvel. Marvel Comics didn't make jack shit in 2009, and it doesn't now, regardless of publicity stunts. Marvel Studios, on the other hand, has been making money right and left. With Marvel Studios splitting away from Marvel Entertainment and answering directly to the Disney higher-ups now, the only things that Marvel Entertainment has now that Disney actually has a real use for is Marvel Television and the IPs. They otherwise have no interest in Marvel Comics because no amount of gimmicks have managed to raise or lower their sales in any meaningful, long-term way.

Disney intervening would be the best thing that could happen to the comics. Get a visionary like Fiege (regardless how you feel about the MCU) or whatever to head it up and fix things.

They already have Permutter, what they need is another Fiege, someone who understands the medium.

You have no idea what you're talking about underage. Marvel was so successful in their target demographic that an even bigger company bought them so they could share in their success.

Hell, bring in Feige himself if he wants the additional responsibilities. And if they have to fire Perlmutter to appease him, so be it.

>progressive company
>second biggest media conglomerate on the planet

good one

Kek no they werent. They were a failing IP that was selling off their characters. I'm betting you are under 20 and not even old enough to have been reading Marvel back in early 2000s.

You kind of completely missed the point there user.

They sold off their characters in the late '90s to stay afloat. The contractually-promised revenues from the movies by Fox, Sony, New Line, et al., kept them afloat during the early 2000s

By 2008, just a year before the Disney buyout, they were well off enough to make their own movies with the revenue that the previous movies by Fox, Sony, et al. were bringing in. In 2009, on the strength of Iron Man and despite the financial failure of The Incredible Hulk, they were a rising star in the film industry that Disney wanted to have making money for them. If that's a failing IP, then I'm the King of England.

>I try to convince myself a parent company doesnt care about the subsidiary

>You dont appeal to a demo that made the company you bought go bankrupt. They purchased a recognizable IP which failed miserably financially. How new are you to comics?
How new are you? Marvel went bankrupt because of a series of increasingly poor and short-sighted investment decisions, one of which was to ignore their actual audience in favor of the nonexistent "collector's market", coupled with Diamond's (as well as Diamond's then-top competitor) equally poor and short-sighted decision to lower their standards for comic book shops to get more money out of the speculation bubble of the early nineties. It was that bubble - which Marvel itself helped to inflate - bursting that did Marvel in, not the target demographic being fickle. But sure, go on acting like you know anything about Marvel's business history.

The movies are more faithful to the comics than the comics.

At this point, it's obvious that nothing I say will ever convince you that Marvel Entertainment is, as far as Disney is concerned, just a source of IPs that Disney, Marvel Studios, and their licensees can make money from, and that Marvel Entertainment's business decisions are their own.

And your childish insults aren't faring any better at convincing me that there's some grand conspiracy of Disney executives going out of their way to turn Marvel Comics into a clone of all the other Disney divisions for no good reason.

Never. The Marvel characters have stayed popular for decades & are global icons. Power Rangers was a fad in the '90s. Spider-Man merch alone is worth keeping Marvel around.

This new wave of X-Men Marvel Legends I just got proves there isn't an embargo. The next X-Men wave out next year & new Invisible Woman figure also add to that.

It's funny, because my friend complains about ESPN now when they have interviews with the players' mothers to get different demographics.

Then how come neither franchise is allowed to appear in any mobile game or cartoon after 2015? How come it took this long for a new X-men or FF toy to come out?

Just because they're putting stuff out now doesn't disprove the embargo. It only means that terms have changed. The restrictions may have been relaxed on toys, but they're still selling edited Secret Wars t-shirts.