Iron-Man, Black Panther & More Could've Joined Spider-Man At Sony

IMAGE VIA MARVEL STUDIOS

They’ve just celebrated 10 years and Black Panther is hitting cinemas around the world today and will defiantly smash box office records along the way. However, all of Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios’ hard work nearly wouldn’t have happened.

In the 90s the entire Marvel company (Comics, TV/Movies etc) was near becoming bankrupted and just to keep their heads above water they had to sell the film rights to their characters.

Twentieth Century Fox got X-Men and Fantastic Four and Sony picked up Spider-Man and even selling Captain America to Warner Brothers. As well as Spider-Man, Sony Pictures could’ve got even more.

IMAGE VIA MARVEL COMICS

The Wall Street Journal reported a section of a new book called The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies and it revealed Sony nearly owned the rights to plenty of the MCU’s biggest heroes.

Before Feige, there was Ike Perlmutter, who was the Marvel boss at the time, and he offered the studio the chance to own Iron Man, Thor, Ant-Man, Black Panther and plenty more for the cheap price of $25 million.

Sony’s Yair Landau recalls what’s the company’s reaction saying “Nobody gives a shit about any of the other Marvel characters. Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man.”

Hindsight is a great thing has Sony executives would be kicking themselves now and at the time X-Men, Fantastic Four and Spider-Man were the biggest names in Marvel’s catalogue.

However, now Marvel Studios has become a cultural behemoth despite how I personally feel about these films that deserve nothing but respect.

Black Panther is now in cinemas in UK and US, check out my five-star review here!

IMAGE VIA MARVEL STUDIOS