Originally Posted by DaFace:
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.
Yeah, if anyone wants to disagree with anything I said there, I'll defer. I know fuck all about this apart from some back of the napkin calculations I could find.
But it certainly appears that Disney is asking for a WAY bigger cut. And that it was big enough for Sony to justify taking a pretty big risk in walking away.
Originally Posted by DJ's left nut:
Yeah, if anyone wants to disagree with anything I said there, I'll defer. I know fuck all about this apart from some back of the napkin calculations I could find.
But it certainly appears that Disney is asking for a WAY bigger cut. And that it was big enough for Sony to justify taking a pretty big risk in walking away.
Originally Posted by DJ's left nut:
Yeah, if anyone wants to disagree with anything I said there, I'll defer. I know **** all about this apart from some back of the napkin calculations I could find.
But it certainly appears that Disney is asking for a WAY bigger cut. And that it was big enough for Sony to justify taking a pretty big risk in walking away.
Originally Posted by DJ's left nut:
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.
Marvel can also kill off spiderman again. Which I heard is happening. Stop games from being made and action figures. Let Sony kill off profits themselves like they did with Garfield. Marvel has shown they will play the long game.
Hopefully they compromise.
Wonder if the mcu cod create a new character. Now that it is known who Spidey is. He needs. New identity. Then start right after far from home with that. [Reply]
Well, that sucks. I like Tom Holland, but if they're going to keep going with him as Spiderman, that means they're going to have to just kind of pretend that the rest of the MCU characters don't exist (since I'm sure Disney won't give them the rights to even mention the others at this point). So that's going to make it all weird and isolated.
I'll probably still watch, but I have dramatically less interest in watching Spiderman standalones. [Reply]
This version of Spider Man won't make much sense if the MCU components are cut out. I guess you can retcon Uncle Ben as his primary motivator/mentor but we've already spent 5 movies setting up Tony Stark as that figure. Hell, all of his equipment is Stark based tech. This is going to be weird, and Sony having to write their way out of it doesn't seem feasible given their track record. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Superturtle:
This version of Spider Man won't make much sense if the MCU components are cut out. I guess you can retcon Uncle Ben as his primary motivator/mentor but we've already spent 5 movies setting up Tony Stark as that figure. Hell, all of his equipment is Stark based tech. This is going to be weird, and Sony having to write their way out of it doesn't seem feasible given their track record.
I'd be curious to know how the agreements even work. Can they even mention the name "Tony Stark" without Disney's approval? If not, that's gonna be...problematic. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Superturtle:
This version of Spider Man won't make much sense if the MCU components are cut out. I guess you can retcon Uncle Ben as his primary motivator/mentor but we've already spent 5 movies setting up Tony Stark as that figure. Hell, all of his equipment is Stark based tech. This is going to be weird, and Sony having to write their way out of it doesn't seem feasible given their track record.
In the comics, Tony Stark lets it slip that he knows about Peter's spider-sense after he gives Peter the Stark-tech Spidey Suit. Spider-man realizes that the suit is analyzing him and sending that info back to Tony Stark so he gets rid of it. That could easily be done in this universe too. [Reply]
Originally Posted by WhawhaWhat:
In the comics, Tony Stark lets it slip that he knows about Peter's spider-sense after he gives Peter the Stark-tech Spidey Suit. Spider-man realizes that the suit is analyzing him and sending that info back to Tony Stark so he gets rid of it. That could easily be done in this universe too.
Originally Posted by Deberg_1990:
Interesting. Sounds like Sony is going to try and press on with the same creative team. Tom Holland and director Watts.
I’ll bet they shoehorn him into the Venom franchise
That's why they're doing this, they probably made a crazy offer to Disney for a new deal, one they knew Disney wouldn't accept and they were going to plan to bring Spider-man into Venom 2 at the end somehow to setup a must have third film even if the second one sucks. [Reply]