Marvel Almost Sold Off Captain America And Thor Film Rights

The Avengers as we have come to know them might have been very different if Marvel had continued down their previous licensing strategy. While there is a debate about who started what and who called who, producer David Maisel was still instrumental in changing Marvel’s outlook.

After a few successful hits like Blade, X-Men, and Spider-Man, Marvel was finally consistently in the black and had no plans on stopping what got them there, which was licensing out their properties to major studios. When Maisel came in, he saw bigger things for the characters and for Marvel, and apparently got to the company right before they were ready to ship off Captain America to Warner Bros. and Thor to Sony, as a recent interview with THR reveals.

“Maisel says the company’s focus was on licensing other characters, “the more movies, the better because there’s more consumer products to sell. If I had gotten there three months, six months later, those deals (Cap and Thor) would have been done,” he says. “And there would be no chance to bring all these characters together.” Spider-Man already was at Sony, and Iron Man had been idling at New Line. (“They thought it was a lousy property,” says Maisel.) Hulk was at Universal, which had made one semi-successful film.”

Seeing a bigger picture with all of these characters under one umbrella, Maisel blocked those deals, coming into conflict with Ike Perlmutter. “Ike will challenge your argument and your logic in a tough way sometimes, but he will listen, and eventually I convinced him to support what I needed to do to at least try to make a studio.”

Maisel used the direct to DVD animated films to show the team what a group like that could look like, and ultimately they saw what he saw.

“As an early proof of concept, Maisel says he made a deal with Lionsgate to do low-budgeted animated Iron Man and Avengers movies that would go direct to DVD. Lionsgate financed the films for a distribution fee and half the profit. “It allowed me to say to people: ‘Look at the value of our IP. Here’s someone paying all the money, and we have creative control and get half the profits,’ ” says Maisel.”

After seeing Captain America: Civil War, I can’t imagine Cap being in the hands of any other studio, and regardless of who started the idea behind Marvel Studios, I’m just glad it happened.