The former CEO of Marvel
believes otherwise:
He doesn't, and did you read your own quote? Read it again. Look at the names he said, and then look at the names I said and what I said about them. They match. "Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk, Captain America, etc." Notice he does not say Iron Man and Thor? Notice I said Spiderman and Hulk and to a lesser extent Captain America had the name recognition, but Iron Man and Thor did not? He's saying the same thing I said.
This
article in the New York Times also makes it clear that the commercial value of Marvel lies in its characters.
It does. Which is why they made so much money selling Spiderman, X-Men, Fantastic Four, and briefly Hulk. Enough to pull them out of bankruptcy. And NOW the value is also in other previously-lesser-known characters such as Iron Man and Thor and Guardians of the Galaxy and even Blade.
But my point stands, and nothing you've linked to or quoted challenges any of that in the least, it just reinforced what I said. Some of the characters had name recognition and others did not. The ones with the biggest recognition they sold (Spiderman, X-Men, Fantastic Four, and briefly Hulk). The ones that were considered B-level they kept (Iron Man, Thor, Captain America - which was the best of the rest for them). Marvel's internal numbers showed the wider public didn't really have any idea who Iron Man or Thor were, and they had mixed feelings about Captain America if they knew of him at all. But it was the best of what they had remaining after the fire sale to get out of bankruptcy, so that's what they had to go with. But, they were not going in with the advantage they have now. They were going in lacking wide public recognition of those characters.
It's all about the characters. And D&D simply doesn't have any recognizable characters that can be marketed the way Marvel superheroes, or Disney princesses, are marketed. That means any D&D movie is going to be a B-movie, because without the promise of global merchandising nobody is going to fork over $100 million to make it, let alone the $200 million the Marvel blockbusters cost.
First the backing will of course come from Hasbro Studios and Universal Studios. They deal is already done. And it's not like Hasbro is a bunch of amateurs at this - they already have two franchises (Transformers and GI Joe), a third big film (Battleship), and 7 more already in the pipeline (Ouji, Jem and the Holograms, Candy Land, Monopoly, Hungry Hungry Hippos, Tonka, and Magic the Gathering). They already have a global brand marketing and merchandising machine in place - indeed, other brands come to THEM for merchandising, because their operation is already so huge. And that's not to mention all the television they already have. There is no doubt at all they have the funding already for a good sized movie and branding and merchandising, and they've committed firmly to it by suing Warner Brothers over the rights. I don't know why you're thinking of this as some tiny operation that needs someone else to fund and merchandise for them - are you kidding me, did you forget Marvel went to Hasbro to merchandise for Marvel when those movies came out?
Second, even if all that were not the case (and it is) they don't need that sort of budget. Blade was made for $45M and made $131M. X-men was made for $75M and made $296M. Spiderman was made for $130M and made $822M. Iron Man was made for $140M and made $585M. Those are the first four modern Marvel-based movies (though Marvel did not own two of those), and all were made for substantially less than $200M and all made HUGE profits. Don't mistake current Marvel budgets for what they were working with initially. Initially, those Marvel-based character movies had fairly normal budgets, and they did well whether they had name recognition going in or not.
Not that all Marvel movies have been such successes. Daredevil (which had MORE name recognition with the public than Iron Man or Thor did) didn't do well. Ghost Rider had mixed success. Hulk did poor to midling (and it had top three name recognition going in). My point is, name recognition isn't as important as you think it is, and Marvel proved that pretty well. Some of the films based on characters with high public recognition did poorly, and some with low recognition did well.
Guardians of the Galaxy is the exception that proves the rule. And it would never have been financed without the track record of blockbusters Marvel already had under its belt. Even then it was a big risk.
Baloney. Blade had zero recognition, zero Marvel blockbusters before it, and it did very well. Hulk had huge recognition and did poorly. And as I have detailed above, Iron Man and Thor had very little recognition (about as much as D&D does) going into those movies, and also did not have the depth of Marvel successes behind it when those movies first launched, but both did well. meanwhile movies like Daredevil which had more recognition than Iron Man or Thor going in did poorly. Success or failure is not predicated on recognition, and there isn't even a very good pattern here to say it's even a top three factor.
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