Marvel - The Rise and Fall...And Rise Again

[Music] i would say that the marvel cinematic universe is the most successful film series ever made you can dispute that if you want but it's not that bold of a statement end game was the highest grossing movie of all time black panther was nominated for best picture the critics seem to like them the audiences generally like them i like them to me they're some of the most impressive movies out there when we look at this unprecedented success that they've been experiencing for over a decade now it feels strange to say that throughout their history marvel has struggled quite a bit i know you wouldn't expect that they've been one of the biggest names in comics created some of the most iconic characters even before the mcu their characters were the focus of some of the biggest superhero movies yet they have experienced some major rises and falls in 1996 they even filed for bankruptcy i want to talk about that along with some key fluctuations over the years going all the way back to the beginning in the late 1930s comic books were really starting to get popular before marvel even existed in 1938 action comics number one was published first exposing the world to superman and of course it was a big financial success and it caused a lot of people to start looking at comic books as a business with some high potential well about a year later we have martin goodman who is in the publishing business specializing in these pulp magazines i always think of the movie pulp fiction when i hear that but there were these cheap fictional stories printed on this low-quality paper it was a big thing at the time back to comics there was this company called funnies inc that represented some writers and artists of comic books they approached goodman with a proposal where essentially the talent from funnies inc would create the comic and then hand it off to goodman where he would print it and distribute it since it seemed like a promising industry something that he might want to be a part of goodman agreed the first comic that was published under this arrangement was none other than marvel comics number one today considered to be the first ever marvel comic that is just awesome to look at can you imagine buying that for 10 cents it notably featured the human torch and the submariner both of which went on to become flagship characters for marvel that first comic was such a success that it motivated goodman to form a new company dedicated to comics called timely productions you may have thought i was going to say marvel there but martin goodman i questioned some of his marketing decisions that first one was clearly branded under marvel comics but they didn't consistently use that name until more than 20 years later the company was initially called timely productions later morphed into atlas publishing in the early 1950s the comics were separately branded typically without any clear indication of who made them i'll pass over the specifics but just know that despite starting with that massive marvel comics logo the name wasn't too significant for them for the next couple of decades alright on to their first rise their early success can be explained by well obviously getting into a growing industry and having cool characters but possibly more than anything they were capitalizing on world war ii dated march 1941 was the first issue of captain america and this is just another iconic cover it is literally captain america punching adolf hitler in the face and the amazing thing is that this was published months before the us even entered the war this more serious topical brand of content started attracting an older audience members of the military themselves were reading them it's pretty clear that the war was a huge contributor to the growth of this company and comic books in general on the negative end it is not ideal to have your sales tied to something like this because by 1945 the war was over and that was bad news for the comic book industries specifically the superheroes they weren't as relevant and people weren't responding to them quite the same way and as a result the sales went down at timely productions i'm gonna go ahead and call that their first fall the way that they rose up from it was pulling away from the superheroes and making their way into other genres of comic books in 1950 for a while they retired their three flagship heroes in favor of other types of publications i'm talking about romance science fiction cowboys horror different ones intended for men women children they were making everything by the 1950s there were dozens of different series they had recovered because when their old methods stopped working they were able to find new ways to attract an audience and maintain their attention it did not last long though because 1954 already marks the start of their next major fall this time it was the comics code authority in short comic books were receiving a lot of heat from the parents they claimed that they were creating criminals by warping the minds of america's youth or whatever you know how it goes the issue was those parental groups also held some power at the time comic books were not sold at specialty stores it was all grocery stores and newsstands places where parents shopped and the comic books made up a small percentage of their sales the parents would simply say i'm not going to shop at these places until they get rid of the comics so they agreed i'm sorry if i sound like i'm disrespecting the issue i can understand their concern at the time some of these comics were excessive but they were just going overboard with it there were these public comic burnings it even made its way into congress it was actually looking like the government may pass some kind of censorship laws so to get in front of it the comic book companies created the comics code authority each comic that met their criteria would receive their stamp of approval and as long as it had that stamp the parents were fine with it the stores could sell it and everything was fine it sounds like a solution but it only hurt their sales even more mostly because that criteria was strict it altered the language how the crimes were portrayed how the people were drawn and overall it just made the comics so much more bland and boring many people were reading them for their edgy content and as i said before many of them weren't even kids it's like if all of a sudden every movie had to be g-rated which would not be good for the industry these stamps continued too the criteria was loosened but marvel still had them on some of their comics through 2001. the comeback from this was because of stan lee there were other people and other factors involved but i like to think that stanley was at the center of it he had worked for marvel almost from the beginning he was hired as a teenager in their first year of business and soon promoted to editor then in 1961 after 22 years with the company along with artist jack kirby he created the fantastic four that first issue marked the beginning of a new era for the company and started to shape marvel into what we know them as today unlike the standard at the time stanley's new characters were imperfect they would argue have internal struggles and were somehow much more relatable and over the next few years he would introduce multiple others that fit that criteria spider-man the incredible hulk x-men a little later this is when the marvel universe started to form and finally the comics were branded under that marvel name amazingly stanley found a way to re-attract the readers while conforming to the strict set of codes okay there were some other minor fluctuations in their business throughout the 70s and 80s but i want to skip ahead to their biggest one that occurred in the 1990s in the early 90s everything was seemingly better than ever sales were hitting all-time highs but some of those numbers may have been a little deceptive in the 1980s and early 1990s for many people comic books became less about reading them and more about collecting them comic book stores were popping up everywhere and certain comics were being sold for hundreds or thousands of dollars now collectibles can be dangerous because so often their value gets inflated and once everyone figures that out the bubble bursts and that's not good for anybody let me tell you what happens marvel puts out a new comic that everyone thinks is going to be really valuable one day so instead of one copy i buy five copies as does everyone else and since everyone bought so many of them well they're just worthless now in the meantime marvel just made a ton of sales but once this bubble bursts and we all realize that we just wasted our money buying five copies of a comic that we didn't even care about reading once we're done buying comics the whole situation resulted in a dramatic rise and fall in sales which is bad news but not quite bad enough to force them into bankruptcy that's where the debt becomes a factor leading up to 1993 when marvel was on top of the world they were spreading themselves thin by going into debt to buy all these other companies they would have been able to handle that debt as long as their sales had stayed strong but since their sales fell they couldn't make their payments and they filed for bankruptcy now that's enough to justify it but there's even another layer to this in the early 90s they were working to expand into trading cards in 1992 they bought flir for 265 million dollars trading cards are another industry that famously created a bubble that burst right around the same time maybe if they had bought into something else they could have used those sales to power through but you could see how these decisions just made things worse following the bankruptcy there were new owners but first i want to take a quick detour and talk about all the transfers of ownership that have happened with marvel i'll do it fast remember in 1939 it was formed by martin goodman he owned it until 1968 when it was bought by perfect film and chemical corporation who quickly changed their name in 1986 it was sold to a film company called new world pictures who didn't do much with it because they sold it to andrew's group two years later that's who owned it leading up to the bankruptcy it was led by this guy ron perlman who tends to get a lot of the blame for their failure then following the bankruptcy in 1998 this company toy biz became the new owners and changed their name to marvel strangely enough toy biz was one of the companies that marvel acquired preceding the bankruptcy five years earlier marvel bought 46 of them in this big deal that included an extended licensing agreement for their toys all right that was a lot and i might as well just finish it because we all know where this is heading in 2009 marvel was acquired by disney for around four billion dollars in a deal that included both cash and stock i have to think that their motivation behind this acquisition was the rights to the thousands of characters they would receive and the rights to make movies about them even before disney was involved it was looking like movies were going to be the future of marvel the way they were going about it was to make deals with the studios to sell them their rights to their characters you know the rights to spider-man went to sony and then the rights to x-men and some others went to fox the issue with that was superhero movies weren't nearly as big as they are today and there wasn't much value in selling the movie rights so the movies were making money but due to the deals that were in place marvel was not seeing much of it in 2005 they figured that it would be smarter to try to create their own studio and that way they can keep all of their profits that's when they took out a 525 million dollar loan to create marvel studios soon after they put out iron man the first movie that they fully funded by themselves and we all know what a huge success it was the following year disney bought marvel and together they've done something special in creating some of the coolest most financially successful movies of all time so for the final and most dramatic rise and fall the fall was from the bubble bursting in the comic book and trading card industries along with excessive debt and the rise i think we can say is from their transition into films and the involvement of disney let me know in the comments what do you think of all these fluctuations personally i think it's nice to see a company that's gone through so much finally hit this level of success in 1996 it was looking like that may have been about it but they worked their way back it's just such a great comeback story also i'm curious what's your favorite movie in the mcu and any other thoughts you have about marvel leave them in the comments i'd like to hear what you have to say thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: Company Man

Views: 525,496

Keywords:

Id: q8JMfWUSlZs

Length: 12min 37sec (757 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021