Both Sony and Disney are idiots on this.
[Reply]

Fools.
[Reply]

Both are idiots, but Sony really needs to understand they need Marvel a hell of a lot more than Marvel needs them.
[Reply]

I mean...maybe?

I don't think Phase 4 is going to be the license to print money that the originals were. They will have audiences, for sure - but they'll be smaller. And what will really hurt them are the misses, presuming there are some.

Thor 2, Iron Man 3 and Age of Ultron were just utter shite. But the damage was minimal to non-existent - the next movie came out and the machine just kept churning. The intertia of the MCU was unstoppable.

I don't know that I see that in Phase 4. There's a lot of change here and any stumble could continue to cast ripples.

Maybe you're right and Sony should just do what it takes to get this done, but I definitely think we've seen Peak MCU and there's not far to go but down from here. Perhaps Sony isn't quite so willing to go blindly forward with that sort of ship.
[Reply]

Let’s talk about something most folks won’t talk about: Endgame wasn’t very good.

It just felt prolonged and boring. I don’t know that I would rank it a top 3 MCU movie
[Reply]

The phrases "not top 3 MCU" and "wasn't very good" don't seem to jive for me. Was it the best ever? I dunno. But it was still a very, very good movie.
[Reply]

What the fuck are you smoking? Endgame was great.
[Reply]

Even if what you said was true, which it isn't, this isn't really an indictment of anything. In a series with Iron Man, The Winter Soldier, Infinity War, Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor Ragnarok, some really, really good movies are being left out of the top 3.
[Reply]

I don't think it's going to be an issue. Thor is still around, and Ragnarok netted over 800 million on a budget under 200. Captain Marvel was over 1.1 billion. Black Panther was over 1.25 billion. Even Ant Man and the Wasp was over 600 million, as was the first Doctor Strange. Every single one of those is more than any DC movie has ever made and they're all part of whatever team up is coming.

I don't know how stuff like The Eternals and Shang-Chi are going to do, but I'd be surprised if they don't find some way to get people in theaters.

And I don't think it's going to hurt them at all to have shows on Disney+ either.

And then there's the X-Men and Fantastic Four.

Twenty years ago who would've thought the MCU would be what it is now? And that was done primarily without Spider-Man. I wouldn't bet against them at this point.
[Reply]

Shangchi will make 2 billion in Asia if done correctly.
[Reply]

Sony has proven to be incompetent...Marvel has not, who you gonna trust?
[Reply]

But Marvel's not making a trivial ask here.

They're asking for ten times the profits of their original agreement; they were getting 5% and now they want 50%. That's not nothing.

From a strictly dollars and cents standpoint, Marvel has to be hugely responsible for the profits here to make this work. Moreover, nothing says Sony couldn't go back if momentum dries up.

For instance, lets say they agree with Marvel and Feige directs and the next Spiderman makes $1B in gross - well generally speaking you're talking in the 40-45% range in terms of how much of the gross actually gets back to the studios after theaters, etc... are paid. So lets just say $425 million back to the studio.

now we have a $160 million budget. Let's chip in another $100 million for marketing costs (which seems conservative but we'll stand there). Now we're down to $165 million in profits and that's BEFORE we get to additional incidentals like profit cuts for key figures in production. Then you add back in rentals, on demand, etc... but you can't include merchandising because Sony already lost that.

Now this mostly becomes a wild-ass guess at this point but let's say that there's a pool of roughly $300 million in profit available to Sony and Marvel after all is said and done there. Everyone's paid and all the revenue streams have paid roughly what they're gonna pay - that seem fair? If not, why not?

Let's work from that - Marvel wants $150 million of it under the new agreement. Leaving $150 million behind for Sony.

Sony can easily coast on the momentum of 'Into the Spiderverse' (which kicked ass without Marvel's help) and make at least a couple of movies with profits in excess of the $150 million they'd end up with after Marvel's cut. And that's all they need to do - coast. They can make at least one of them and if it's good, they've make another one. And if it's a success, another.

Venom got great returns and made a ton of money without Feige and the MCU. Sony can do that with Spiderman, especially now that they have momentum on their side. And they don't have to be as successful as they would've been - just 51% as successful. If so, they'll be money ahead. And if (when?) the momentum stalls - you go back to Marvel and discuss another merger.

But Sony's gambling on themselves a bit and that's not a terrible idea. They've shown some signs that they may not suck at this right now.
[Reply]

Yeah, I'm not hard on Sony here. Especially since Spiderman was being groomed as Iron Man's heir apparent on the team and is the most recognizable hero left in the Avengers.
[Reply]

I could be wrong on this, but I don't think those two percentages are apples-to-apples comparisons. The 5% is described as "first dollar gross," which I would take to mean it's a pure 5% of revenue (and expenses don't matter). The other arrangement Disney was proposing was "50/50 co-financing," which I would interpret as both of them have an equal stake in both the expenses and revenues (so Disney gets 50% of the profits rather than 5% of the gross revenue).

I'm sure that the 50/50 still is massively better for Disney than the 5%, but I don't THINK your assessment that it would be "ten times the profits" is accurate.

EDIT: To further disclaim this, I'm only about 75% sure I'm understanding this correctly, but using figures from Far From Home, the film looks like it made about $1.1 billion worldwide, so Disney's share would be about $55 million. If you remove 3x production budget from that (which I've heard is a rough rule of thumb for total budget including marketing and distribution), that would mean Disney would have gotten like $310 million. So yeah, Disney's proposal is still massively different than the status quo. However, the 5% version says that "If the film tanks, Disney still gets paid," while the 50/50 version says "If the film tanks, Disney takes a hit just like Sony." So it's not COMPLETELY in Disney's favor do move to the latter arrangement.
[Reply]