As Sony considers where to take the Spider-Man franchise, and Fox continues to let the cast leak details about Fantastic Four, it’s a common refrain that they should just give up and give Marvel back their characters. But that’s not only something that’ll never happen… it’s something that you really don’t want to happen.
Let’s start with why it won’t happen, which is down to simple Hollywood economics. Sony basically has Spider-Man for their summer movies and little else. Fox, meanwhile, just gave Bryan Singer what he wanted and was rewarded with the single most successful X-Men movie in the franchise’s history this summer, and it doesn’t exactly have a lot of ongoing franchises right now either. Planet of the Apes has had two surprising commercial and critical hits in a row, but it isn’t pulling in X-Men money.
That feeds into Hollywood’s overall trend. In general, major studios are making fewer and fewer movies and spending more and more on them, partially because studios are looking for somebody else to pay the bills. And as the dynamics of Hollywood shift more towards a global audience, it’s going to get even more risk-averse as more money is on the line with fewer movies to back it up.
So, the idea of a character with some proven hits behind him is appealing to studios, which is why there’s a DC Cinematic Universe announced through 2020 and Universal is bringing back their monsters. This isn’t to say that, eventually, they won’t run their Marvel characters into the ground and salt the earth for at least a decade, but they’ll cling to their Marvel characters until the bitter end.
Considerably helping matters? Marvel probably doesn’t want them back.
Say Marvel got all its characters back tomorrow. What would they do with them? Keep in mind, Marvel announced its slate through 2019, and Kevin Feige claims to have a rough outline that stretches to 2028.
Even if they were willing to shake things up, the earliest we’d see a Spidey or Fantastic Four movie would be 2020, and that assumes they’d make it at all. Marvel’s spent so much time and money building a universe without these characters that they’d likely, at best, toss in a cameo or two. Not exactly how one envisions the triumphant return of Marvel’s first family or Peter Parker.
And other studios making these movies is a great business for Disney. They don’t care what Sony makes or loses on a Spidey movie, for example, because they have a competitor spending millions to promote a character they own in all other media. Even if the movie tanks, interest in Spidey comics, cartoons, and merch goes up, and if the movie’s merch tanks, they’re not the ones out the cash. And they get a cut of everything the movie does, ever, from theatrical receipts to Netflix streams, for the rest of time.
Eventually, Marvel will probably get its characters back. Trends fade, movie studios change regimes, and any series has to be left to rest for a while. But don’t expect it to be soon, and don’t expect Marvel to try and take their characters back. They don’t need them, and it’s more profitable not to.
