User:Kathleenlovesbread/sandbox

There have been many movies made based on characters created by Marvel Comics. The first is the 1944 Captain America serials made by Republic Pictures although the serials resemble the comics little. More than forty live-action films have been released, with Avengers: Age of Ultron being the most recently released. In addition, films made from Marvel imprints, like Men in Black and Kick-Ass, and animated films, like Big Hero 6, have been made. As of May 1, 2015, all films based on Marvel Comics’s properties have grossed over $7 billion in the United States and over $17 billion worldwide.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, Marvel sold off the film rights to many of their most popular titles like Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men. This has led to many different studios making films based on Marvel properties like 20th Century Fox’s Fantastic Four and X-Men films as well as Columbia Pictures Spider-Man films. The box office success of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films and Bryan Singer’s X-Men films in the early 2000s made Marvel executives want to produce their own Marvel films. Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 made Columbia Pictures, who had distributed the films, $1.6 billion while Marvel only received $75 million. To solve this problem and start producing their own films, Marvel made a deal with Merrill Lynch. Merrill Lynch would put up $525 million for Marvel to use to make films for ten characters they owned the rights to, and Marvel put up the film rights to the characters as collateral.

Marvel Studios is a subsidiary of Marvel Entertainment, owned by The Walt Disney Company. The studio makes films and shows based on Marvel properties. Kevin Feige is the president. When Marvel got the funding from Merrill Lynch, the strategy was to develop separate films about the individual Avengers and then combine the characters in a team-up movie. The first in this series of films was Iron Man in 2008, followed by a sequel, and then a Captain America film and Thor film. These movies culminated in 2012’s Avengers film which went on to gross $1.5 billion. These movies together create the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is a shared fictional universe for the eleven films and three television series so far created, the most recent film being Avengers: Age of Ultron. The franchise has grossed over $2.9 billion and is the highest-grossing film franchise in the United States.