Is Marvel Ready for its Close-Up? Yes, it would appear:
In 1998, after years of mismanagement by financier Ronald Perelman had left the company bankrupt, toy executive Isaac Perlmutter bought 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 hit No. 1 at the box office. All told, the 12 Marvel-character films made during Arad’s tenure have grossed $3.6 billion worldwide. Profit has quadrupled in the past three years to $103 million in 2005, revenue has surged, and Marvel’s stock, as low as $3 per share at the time of the 1998 acquisition, trades today at about $20.
Now Marvel wants to move from licensing its properties — for a low-risk 2 to 10 percent of profits — to producing its own movies:
Marvel has borrowed more than $500 million to finance its filmmaking and will have to absorb heavy losses basically on its own if any of its self-made films bomb. Under certain conditions, it could even lose control of the rights to its characters. But to Arad, 58, the risk is worth running, and the reason can be summed up by this fact: The two Spider-Man films have grossed nearly $1.6 billion at the box office; Marvel is estimated to have received just $75 million of that. “Nobody knows better than us how to make our characters come alive for audiences,” Arad says. “We just want to get paid for it.”