The Avengers Could Have Looked A Lot Different If This Had Happened!

It's hard to remember a time when Marvel Studios didn't exist.  At one point, Marvel was financially in the red, and they needed to do something quick in order to avoid bankruptcy.  Their solution?  They started selling off all of their comic book properties to different movie studios.  The X-Men and Fantastic Four were purchased by 20th Century Fox, Spider-Man went to Sony, Blade went to New Line Cinemas, The Punisher went to Lionsgate, and the Hulk was sent to Universal.  Each company made profitable movies, even if they weren't up to the current Marvel quality, and this helped push Marvel into the black.  Seeing that this was helping them make money again, both in licensing agreements and merchandise, they began to plan on selling off more of their comic book characters.  Then, David Maisel walked in.


When Maisel arrived at Marvel, he saw a bigger universe for them to explore rather than sell everything off to other companies.  At the time, Marvel's focus was on licensing their other comic book properties to movie companies.  Two of these properties that were being negotiated at the time were Captain America and Thor, Cap going to Warner Brothers and Thor going to Sony.  Even an Iron Man deal had been "idling" at New Line, but hadn't gone through because, "they thought it was a lousy property."  But Maisel saw something that no one else did...a unified Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).  Convincing Ike Perlmutter (Marvel Entertainment CEO) was not an easy sell, though.  Maisel said of his conversations with 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 last try and make a studio."


This was a big gamble.  So how did he finally convince Pertmutter to agree to go along?  First, Maisel blocked the deals involving Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man.  Then, in order to show his superiors how well this could work in theaters, he went to Lionsgate and brokered a deal with them to do a low-budget, straight to DVD animated Iron Man and the Avengers movie.  Lionsgate financed the film for a distribution fee, and they also received half of the profits.  Maisel says, "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."


Luckily, Marvel saw the benefit of this strategy and agreed to Maisel's vision.  Their first movie that they released was Iron Man back in 2008. Seeing how profitable the new movie studio was becoming, Disney then bought it back in 2009 and they have been getting bigger and better ever since.