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Article 10: License To Shill
By the time you read this, the PUNISHER movie will have been open in America for just over a week. It doesn't open in the UK for a few weeks yet, and I can't honestly say I plan to see it. Judging from the very mixed reviews I've read, it seems to have tried to adapt elements of the Garth Ennis stories without actually recognising that they're meant to be funny. Not a desperately good start. Still, it debuted at number two in the American box office, behind KILL BILL, which should keep Marvel happy enough. Despite the slightly shaky film versions of DAREDEVIL and HULK, the basic business plan is holding up well. In their 2003 annual report, Marvel sum up their strategy as "to exploit our unrivalled portfolio of intellectual property through Marvel's unique licensing focussed business model aimed at limited risk and prudent capital investment." In layman's terms, that means "plunder the back catalogue, licence it for a shitload of cash, and then sit back and count the money." Purists may baulk at Marvel placing licensing, rather than publishing, at the centre of their business. (And if you wade through their accounts and legal documents, you'll find Marvel make numerous references to licensing as their "core" business.) But the figures speak for themselves. In 2003, Marvel brought in $139.4m in operating income through licensing, compared to only $25.4m from publishing. When licensing brings in that much cash, no wonder it becomes the core business. The catch is that it can lead to a temptation to put the cart before the horse. The rumour mill has for a while been reporting that Marvel's management would like to see at least the core characters taken in less controversial and more marketable directions. Marvel haven't actually announced any such policy, but the evidence tends to suggest that it does exist. (In fact, Chuck Austen confirmed its existence in an interview a couple of weeks back, saying, "Basically, the situation is: Marvel's got new policies in place to make their stuff skew younger. A new 'Code', if you will. They've described it as 'playing it safe', I think, elsewhere.") But, annoying as this may be for comics readers, Marvel may be right. After all, the licensing is what really brings in the money, not the publishing - and really, what happens in most of the comics these days is entirely incidental to the value of the property. Nobody licenses comics because they want to tap the comics audience, unless it's for something cheap like T-shirts. There aren't enough comics readers to bother making films just for them. Comics are licensed for the same reason books are - because there's thought to be a central idea that has appeal to a wider audience. So, for example, Spider-Man has value because he's already a household name, not because of today's comics. Less well-known characters such as Blade have value (if they have it at all) because somebody thinks there's a good central idea. It's vaguely useful to have ongoing comics for the major characters to stop them turning, like Mickey Mouse, into historical relics. And for the second tier characters, the existence of a comic is totally irrelevant to the success of the film. But really, the value in these characters is already there - and once they become the multimedia juggernauts Marvel seem to be hoping for, the comic becomes a bit of a side issue. Avi Arad is supposed to be a particular fan of the licensing approach, which is hardly surprising given that his job makes him responsible for Marvel Studios. Incidentally, he also has a personal interest in the success of Marvel's licensing, according to their recent proxy filing:-
That's on top of his $350K annual salary, and performance-related bonuses of $250K, by the way. No wonder he's so keen on licensing. If I was Avi Arad, I'd be very excited about the possibilities of licensing too. But then, a very strong argument can be made that this really is the best way for the company to make money. If the comics market is too small to bring in large sums, then use it to generate ideas and then license them off elsewhere. They take the risk, you get the benefit. It's a perfectly sensible approach. And it's not as if Marvel has turned its back completely on the idea of older audiences - the PUNISHER film, if nothing else, isn't being aimed at kids. Besides, where exactly is the money in adult superheroes? Is there actually a mainstream cinema audience for "mature" superheroes, to any degree? Hell, to judge from the sales of the Eye of the Storm books, once you veer too far from the formula, there's barely even an audience for them in comics. If you want to reach older audiences in a licensing model, perhaps you don't want mature superheroes. You need something else entirely. The cause for concern, in the long term, is whether Marvel really has the depth of characters to continue pursuing this approach for years to come. They're always keen to remind investors that they claim a library of 4,700 characters, but as we all know, the reality isn't quite so exciting. Most of those characters are crap. Of the remainder, many are villains and supporting characters inextricably tied up with individual heroes, who can't sensibly be licensed separately. And the whole package is weighted very heavily towards the superhero genre - there's only so many of those movies that you can make. On one level, Marvel seem to recognise this as an issue. The 2003 annual report describes publishing as "a business unit we often view as the R&D function of Marvel, as its creative endeavours are primarily responsible for the formation of our library of over 4,700 characters". Whoever wrote that passage gets the point. Ironically, it seems to me that if this approach was pursued to its logical conclusion, the publishing division could actually be freed up by such an approach. The function of publishing comics becomes not merely to nursemaid old characters (which can drift off to live happy afterlives in other media) but to create new ones. It doesn't cost a huge amount to create a new comic. And, for Marvel, every new comic can be a new idea, and a new licence, and a new income stream. In a licensing-oriented business model, surely you don't need to keep trying to dust off multiple-time failures like IRON FIST. Surely your resources are much better deployed trying to create new ideas. The fantastic thing is, it doesn't even matter if nobody buys the comic or even if it sucks. Nobody bought MEN IN BLACK, but somebody still managed to shift the movie rights. Hell, some bozo even bought the rights to WEREWOLF BY NIGHT, and that's been out of print almost continually for decades. Clearly there's a place for running mainstay characters alongside that, to provide a backbone for the line and to keep characters like Spider-Man from degenerating into mere corporate logos like Mickey Mouse. But it's always seemed to me that a licensing model ought to be something that gives the publishers the incentive and freedom to take risks and try new ideas. After all, it doesn't cost all that much to publish a few new ideas. But, despite the R&D description, Marvel continue to place reliance primarily on their back catalogue. Asked at a recent investor conference call about the company's plans for diversification, Arad and CEO Allan Lipson talked exclusively about existing characters:
But actually adding to the 4,700 seems to be a rather lower priority. In fact, when you stop to think about it, Marvel haven't really created a character who's developed into a major licensing stream since 1974, when the Punisher and Wolverine both debuted. More than a third of their ongoing titles feature characters created in the 1960s. After you take out the X-Men and Spider-Man spinoffs, and the revamps of sixties characters, only RUNAWAYS and PULSE star completely new characters created in the last decade. How does recycling old characters rather than creating new ones amount to R&D? By all means pillage the back catalogue, much of which is little known to the general public. But the supply isn't unlimited, and Marvel's strategy doesn't seem well suited to replenish it. Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review. Ninth Art endorses the principle of Ideological Freeware. The author permits distribution of this article by private individuals, on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice. Back. |