Today when the discussion on the filming of the scene or the characterization of the lead hero of the Marvel Comic hero in a Hollywood gets stuck between the director and Avi Arad,, then Arad calls the final shot. Two reasons for that -

  1. He is Avi Arad, ex chief executive of Marvel Entertainment’s Marvel Studios unit.
  2. He is the one who got Marvel from bankruptcy to million dollar revenues and introduced licensing and movies to it.

In 1998 toy executive Isaac Perlmutter bought bankrupt Marvel and put Arad in charge of getting Hollywood to base blockbuster films on its characters. The results speak for themselves: Under Arad, the first seven Marvel-based films – from the low-budget vampire-hunting epic Blade to the first Spider-Man and X-Men movies – each was a hit No. 1 at the box office. All told, the 12 Marvel-character films made during Arad’s tenure at Marvel have grossed $3.6 billion+ worldwide. Profit has catapulted in the past decade, revenue has surged, and Marvel’s stock, as low as $3 per share at the time of the 1998 acquisition, trades at about $54 when finally Disney bought it over.

Hulk, Iron Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Captain America and Blade are few of the 5000 odd characters of Marvel Comics which have made a rage with the kids and were selected to be made into movies by Marvel. Arad’s animating belief about Marvel was that the company could unlock the maximum value from its comic-book characters only through films, with that medium’s potential for huge paydays. Marvel’s main foray into movies began with a 1998 vampire epic based on Marvel hero – Blade which earned $133 million at the box office. Though Marvel made almost nothing (Arad says Marvel made only $25,000 from the first Blade movie, thanks to lousy licensing terms negotiated years earlier), the movie’s success gave Arad leverage with reluctant studios. Fox bit into X-Men which grossed nearly $300 million globally following its 2000 release. Hollywood jumped on the Marvel bandwagon, pumping out two Men in Black films (total worldwide gross: $1 billion), the Spider-Man megahits, and profitable films based on lesser  known Marvel characters like Daredevil and the Punisher.

Tired of having production houses earn the meat of the profit, Marvel decided to make the films themselves. Marvel tied up with Paramount to handle distribution of the films. After paying the costs of a film’s production, distribution, and marketing, Marvel retains 100 percent of all revenue streams, from box office to DVDs to TV licensing. Marvel, now with Disney, has a tough competitor in DC Comics who owns the rights on heroes like Superman and Batman. DC Comics too have been taken over by Warner Bros. DC Comic’s Batman Returns remains the best comic hero movie ever made. Marvel’s characters are more complex and having conflict of the mind than DC’s.

When Hulk, one of Marvel’s most loved comic hero, did not really shine at box office, Arad decided to remake the movie with less darker version of the character, hence the strong love angle in Incredible Hulk, Iron Man also bought in good amount of moolah to the company and lowered its debt. Marvel is now working on releasing Thor, its most famous Captain America and Avengers in 2011. Meanwhile the rights for X-Men are still with 20th Century Fox and hence will be made by them.

Money comes from strangest of places once people start believing in themselves and take the control!