By the 1980s, comic book collecting had gained the interest of the mainstream

media, which latched onto stories about Golden Age comics selling for thousands
of dollars.

Publishers were themselves courting the collector market by introducing variant

covers, sometimes with foil embossing or other eye-catching, fancy printing
techniques. These were snapped up hungrily by readers, but also by speculators
assuming that they’d stumbled on a sure-fire means of making money by storing
copies up and selling them for a profit in the future.

Boom To Bust
While the comics were flying off the shelves, Marvel attracted the interest of a man
named Ron Perelman. Often pictured with a broad grin and a huge cigar in his
hand, Perelman was a millionaire businessman with a variety of interests: in 1985,
he’d made a huge deal for cosmetic firm, Revlon through his holding company,
MacAndrews & Forbes. In early 1989, Perelman spent $82.5 million on purchasing
the Marvel Entertainment Group, then owned by New World Pictures.

Within two years, Marvel was on the stock market, and Perelman went on a
spending spree: he bought shares in a company called ToyBiz, snapped up a couple
of trading card companies, Panini stickers, and a distribution outfit, Heroes World.
All told, those acquisitions cost Marvel a reported $700 million.

Through the early ’90s, Marvel was buoyed by the success of Spider-Man and X-
Men, which were selling in huge numbers. Sales of a new comic, X-Force, were
similarly huge, thanks in part to a cunning sales gimmick: the first issue came in a
polybag with one of five different trading cards inside it. If collectors wanted to
get hold of all five cards, they – you guessed it – had to buy multiple copies of the
same comic. With the boom still in full swing, that’s exactly what collectors did –
as former Comics International news editor Phil Hall recalls, fans were buying five
copies to keep pristine and unopened, and a sixth to tear into and read.

Then, just as Gaiman predicted, the bubble burst. Between 1993 and 1996,
revenues from comics and trading cards began to collapse. Suddenly, Marvel,
which at one point seemed invincible as it grew in size, now looked vulnerable.

“When the business turned,” observed then-chariman and CEO of Marvel Scott
Sassa, “it was like everything that could go wrong did go wrong.”

Some in the industry went further, and argued that Perelman’s tactics had
endangered the entire industry:
“[Perelman] reasoned, quite correctly, that if he raised prices and output, that
hardcore Marvel fans would devote a larger and larger portion of their disposable
income toward buying comics,” wrote Chuck Rozanski, CEO of Mile High
Comics. “Once he had enough sales numbers in place to prove this hypothesis, he
then took Marvel public, selling 40% of its stock for vastly more than he paid for
the entire company. The flaw in his plan, however, was that he promised investors
in Marvel even further brand extensions, and more price increases. That this plan
was clearly impossible became evident to most comics retailers early in 1993, as
more and more fans simply quit collecting due to the high cost, and amid a
widespread perception of declining quality in Marvel comics.”

Whether Perelman was directly to blame or not, the consequences for the industry
as a whole were painful in the extreme. Hundreds of comic book retailers went
bust as sales tumbled by 70 percent. Suddenly, the boom had turned to bust, and
even Perelman admitted that he hadn’t anticipated the dark future Gaiman had
warned about in his speech.

”We couldn’t get a handle on how much of the market was driven by speculators,”
Perelman said; “the people buying 20 copies and reading one and keeping 19 for
their nest egg…”

A battle in the boardroom

By 1995, Marvel Entertainment was heavily in debt. In the face of mounting
losses, Perelman decided to press on into new territory: he set up Marvel Studios, a
venture which he hoped would finally get the company’s most famous characters
on the big screen after years of legal disputes. To do this, he planned to buy the
remaining shares in ToyBiz and merge it with Marvel, creating a single, stronger
entity.  

Marvel’s shareholders resisted, arguing that the financial damage to Marvel’s share
prices would be too great. Perelman’s response was to file for bankruptcy, thus
giving him the power to reorganize Marvel without the stockholder’s consent.

There followed a bewildering power struggle which raged for almost two years. A
stockholder named Carl Icahn tried to oppose Perelman,

The battle, when it finally ended in December 1998, had a strange outcome which
few could have predicted: after a lengthy court case, ToyBiz and Marvel
Entertainment Group were finally merged, but Perelman and his nemesis Icahn
were both ousted in the process. Other executives with ties with Perlmutter were
also severed, including CEO Scott Sassa, whose tenure had, all told, lasted just
eight months.
They’d been pushed out by two ToyBiz executives who’d been on Marvel’s board
since 1993: Isaac Perlmutter and Avi Arad. With Scott Sassa gone, they installed
the 55-year-old Joseph Calamari, who’d been at the helm of Marvel in the 80s, as
its new CEO.

With the financial intrigue in the boardroom settling down, Marvel began to turn
its attention to a target it had been trying to hit since the 1980s: the movie business.

Marvel on the big screen

Israeli-born Avi Arad brought a gruff swagger to the toy industry. Having risen to
the rank of CEO at ToyBiz, and described as “the hottest developer in the toy
business” by one contemporary, Arad’s big career change came when Marvel
bought a 46 percent share in the company in 1993. Arad had received a 10 percent
share as part of the deal, and while he initially oversaw the production of Marvel
action figures at ToyBiz, he quickly replaced the legendary Stan Lee as the head of
Marvel Films.

Arad served as executive producer on the hit animated TV series X-Men, and by

the summer of 1993, had brokered a deal with 20th Century Fox to make an X-
Men movie.

For years, Marvel had struggled to get its properties onto the big screen: the rights
to Spider-Man were stuck in a tangled web which wouldn’t be unpicked until the
late ’90s, while 1986’s Howard The Duck was a critical and financial disaster. But
now, it looked as though Arad’s approach was going to bear fruit.

Then Marvel’s financial woes began, and Arad struggled to convince Hollywood
executives of the company’s cinematic value. “It was literally a daily fight, trying
to open people’s eyes to what was right in front of them,” he later said.

Things began to change in the late ’90s, when Marvel began to find its feet
again: Blade was a hit, and X-Men began to finally move ahead at Fox. The
pickings for Marvel, however, were slim: Blade made $70 million at the box office,
but the reward for Marvel, according to a Slate article, was a measly $25,000.
The X-Men and Spider-Man movies were huge hits, but Marvel only saw a small
percentage of the profits. “We were giving away the best part of our business,”
Arad mourned.

The birth of a cinematic universe

In 2003, a talent agent named David Maisel came to Marvel’s Isaac Perlmutter
with a proposal. Why not produce the movies under your own banner, and reap the
profits for yourself? And if you’re producing your own movies, why can’t the
stories cross over with each other, just like they do in the comics?

It was an idea that could, in theory, be worth untold millions: while Marvel’s stock
had bounced back since 1996, Maisel argued that going into movie production
could see it soar still further. The problem, however, would be convincing
Marvel’s board of directors and, just as vitally, gaining the requisite financing.

A major breakthrough came in 2005, when Marvel managed to make a deal with
Merrill Lynch. The details of the deal sounded risky: Marvel was essentially
offering up the jewels of its business – characters like Thor and Captain America –
as collateral. If the films didn’t make money, those superheroes would suddenly
belong to the bank.

Nevertheless, Merrill Lynch gave Marvel access to a huge reservoir of cash: $525
million over seven years, which it could use to spend on 10 movies with budgets
ranging from $45m to $180m. With their newfound clout, Marvel managed to
reacquire the rights to characters it had sold over the years, including Iron Man,
Black Widow, Thor, and Hulk.

Shortly after the deal with Merill Lynch went through, Marvel announced that Iron
Man would be its first independent production. Finally, a character who’d
languished in development hell since the 1990s (Universal originally owned the
rights, before they passed to Fox and then New Line) was finally getting a shot at
big-screen stardom.

While work on Iron Man began, Marvel made another important acquisition –

one as important to its future success, perhaps, as the recovery of some of its
most famous superheroes.

A president and a $4 billion deal

Kevin Feige got his start in the film business as an assistant to producer Lauren
Shuler Donner (wife of director Richard). Feige’s love of comics was such that,
despite his relatively young age, he landed the role of producer on Fox’s
production of X-Men – he was just 27 at the time. Going on to produce other
Marvel films thereafter – including Spider-Man, Daredevil, and Hulk – Feige was
brought in as president of Marvel Studios in 2007. Under his watch, Marvel
continued to blossom; Iron Man, his first credit as producer for the studio, made
$585 million, kick starting a cinematic universe that is still only just unfolding.

The next turning point came in 2009, when Disney purchased Marvel for a
dizzying $4.3 billion Avi Arad insisted, with his usual bluster, that Disney had
netted itself a bargain. “It’s a cheap price!” Arad said. “It’s nothing! It’s a very
strong brand, and we planned on this brand. It wasn’t a fluke.”
Marvel’s track record over the past near-decade seems to bear Arad out: The
Avengers alone made billions, and currently ranks as the third highest grossing
film of all time. Iron Man 3 became the second Marvel film to gross more than $1
billion. Even a quirky film like Guardians Of The Galaxy – a space opera some
regarded as a gamble – made more than $750 million. Black Panther has become
not only another $1 billion plus success story, but one of the highest grossing films
of all time.

For a company that was in debt 20 years ago, Marvel has seen a remarkable change
in fortunes. Superhero-like, Marvel survived its darkest hour in 1996, and from the
jaws of defeat, pulled a multi-billion dollar victory.