VintageComics

This is just another really great example of how corporate influence can ruin a potentially good movie. I can't imagine having an artistic vision in my head to produce and someone mucking with it until it no longer resembles the original concept. You can call it many things but the words unfair and abhorrent come to mind. Wow.

Bosco, what's happening is there's a small group of people who dislike me because I've disagreed with them in the past and they follow me around from thread to thread. The reason there's so much wrangling going on wherever I post is because they try to use my own words against me to trip me up, bait me into a strike or just grate on me while trying not to make it appear so. I don't engage them because it's fruitless, as you've already seen. Just wanted to be transparent and apologize to everyone for the constant, unnecessary distractions.

As people we often ignore things that don't fit into our own narratives and those narratives are formed for different reasons. Some of us just don't understand the entire picture enough to see it, some of us have emotional or financial reasons, but it's clear as day that Disney and Fox were embroiled in an all out proxy war against each other to anyone paying attention and being objective. To argue otherwise is pretty much impossible to do. I know you love it when I post in the movie forum ( ) so thanks for sharing all of that and filling in the picture. It's much appreciated.

See? I had NO idea about ANY of these details, but all you need to have is a simple understanding of how business works, how human nature works and a little logic to piece it together and you can form a reasonable picture. Some people just don't get it or refuse to see it. And this is just the stuff we KNOW about. I don't think most people can imagine the resources put into corporate espionage to squeeze out the competition. These corporations are no different than countries going to war, and in fact, they are basically as large as small countries so it's no surprise that they'd employ similar tactics. It's nice to think that everyone in charge would act like Snow White, but that's not reality. That's the illusion Disney and all corporations project while the corporate boardroom is performing slash and burn strategies to overtake the competition.

Sony gave Marvel merchandising rights to Spider-Man like action figures, t-shirts and other stuff, while Fox gave Marvel nothing for X-Men and Fantastic Four. Yes. Sony had a very different working relationship with Marvel than Fox did. There was animosity between Disney and Fox whereas Sony was much more open to working with Marvel. Remember the huge Sony email hack of 2014? If I remember correctly, this really exposed Sony in a bad way publicly, hurting them financially and it changed Sony's working relationship with Marvel. At one point, we were discussing here whether Sony was actually going to give up the rights to Spider-man in full. Instead, I believe Sony extended far more licensing to Marvel to compensate for their financial losses from the email hack and so managed to hang onto the franchise. Boscos posts in the last 24 hours seem to support this as well.

So I'm back to where I started... Disney's actions (or inactions) either didn't rise to the level of materially harming the license (ie, Fox) or Fox's lawyers were incompetent or negligent. Having dealt with Fox's lawyers, I can tell you that at least the ones I dealt with were neither of those two things. You keep working from the premise that because Fox didn't sue that it didn't happen, which it obviously did. I understand why you'd look at it this way from your extensive experience but you're looking at it from inside the goldfish bowl, outward. I think the better question would be to ask WHY Fox didn't sue? And the answer could be as simple as why these huge corporations sometimes make huge mistakes, like completely destroying a franchise that seems difficult to destroy (Like John Carter or DC's butchering of their own DC Cinematic Universe), or forgetting to put out a movie to secure the rights which has happened, or just too much corporate confusion to get a clear signal as to how to act (very common). Or maybe they just didn't think they could make the case. Another good question is, why did Fox eventually sell the FF and X-men rights? Where they hurting financially in 2017? I think it would be a very interesting study to do a deep dive into the movie releases circa 2010 - 2017/19 to see if Disney was actually, strategically using it's movie releases to drown out Fox in cinemas the way they were using comics to starve them out until the acquisition. Fascinating stuff.

Wouldn't a large part of it's lack of success also have to do with Adventure, like Showcase being a 'showcase' book with no dedicated character the way Detective (Batman) and Action (Superman) had? Plus, as the Direct Market exploded, you had many relatively smaller characters get their own titles rather than try to feature them in a series like Adventure. I think all of these things, including the things you mentioned, worked against the title. I don't know if newer readers realize how popular Legion of Super-heroes was over several decades and how they've lost so much of that popularity. There were several decades (or eras) where they were considered one of the premiere titles in all of comics.

All fair points, and I didn't mean to oversimply your point, I just didn't want to have a huge, wordy response. This just solidifies my theory that the corporate structure is prone to corruption, as the more something MUST lean toward profit the more it MUST lean toward corruption. It's a really simple principle that has even been shown to be true through studies. The need for corporate eBay to increase profitability to satisfy stockholders is the only excuse I too can think of that they wouldn't implement the 12 hour rule again. But additionally, having been a part of the many shill bidding discussions on here, you can only control what's in your own hands, and as a buyer the Caveat Emptor slogan rings even more true. Don't get caught in heat, bidding more than you should pay for an item. Price protection has been a practice since the dawn of time, and the only thing that really changes is how intricate the fraud gets as better mousetraps get built. Or, again, if you raise children who don't value profit and corruption over integrity, those people will find more honorable ways to turn a profit and run a business and I'm going to beat that drum until the day I die, because that's the real solution to every problem in life. For example, good people won't deal with bad people, immediately stunting the growth of that 'bad' enterprise. Or good people won't work for those types of companies that exhibit poor behavior. Or good people won't encourage that sort of behavior and even speak out against it if / when it comes up in the corporate board room. Or good people won't overextend themselves in ways that puts them into situations where they may consider making bad decisions to get themselves out of it. So having good people in the world is really the solution to most world problems. I really believe that.

It's a shame as I liked the cast. So this could have been much stronger and impactful. As I pointed out in another thread too, Disney / Marvel was absolutely trying to kill the Fantastic Four movie franchise by purposefully cancelling the comic book in 2014 just before the release of the Trank movie. It's unreal how much was going against that movie, making it nearly impossible to succeed. Disney bought Marvel entertainment in 2009 IIRC, so Disney and Marvel worked VERY HARD to destroy the franchise that Fox owned, which probably played directly into Disney buying it from Fox just a few short years after the movie tanked. There was, quite literally, a corporate war going on of Biblical proportions over that franchise. EDITING THIS IN: I wonder in terms of movie releases if Disney / Marvel had other things happening to work against the FF franchise. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if there was even more corporate espionage than we've uncovered in just these few posts that Disney would do, to win back those franchises. The Black Sabbath lyrics for War Pigs "moving people just like pawns in chess" was never so true. They play with people's lives for profit. Mind boggling.

From my end, because I was the one that brought up Depp, I never thought he was an angel. In truth, none of us are. I tend to always think in terms of "leanings". Social media gets the general public to overreact, or 'lean too far' in one direction. I've been called 'the great equivocator' here more than once but I can't help it, it's just how I see the world. If I see an overreaction I tend to try to pull in the opposite direction. As for being made for each other, that's a bit harsh (there I go again! ) I think sometimes the wrong chemistry just draw the worst out of a relationship. It's like being a defenseman and being forced to play in an offensive position in a sport. You can look like a totally terrible athlete, and yet in the correct position you can be an All Star. I just think that maybe they were attracted to each other but not meant for each other. Those are better examples. I just didn't have any come to mind at the time of typing my post, but there are ABSOLUTELY many innocent people that are eviscerated by social media and have their lives ruined, only to be found not to deserve it later, and I genuinely feel for those people. You can't reverse the hate that roots into people's reputations once it goes viral. Someone had stated at some point something along the lines of "well, that's just the way it is" and / or "that's just life for being that famous" or wealthy, or whatever the word was. That's unfair as well. I once bumped into Stan Lee in a public place and jumped the gun to just compliment him and I realized how annoying it was after I did it, because his reply was polite but you could tell it was also very taxing. I learned a powerful lesson to never invade a person's space like that again just because they're popular. I've been very close to extremely famous, popular people ever since and didn't cross that line again. I just don't believe that because someone is famous or wealthy that it's OK to treat them differently. Many people argue that the wheels of justice shouldn't spin differently for them and by that logic, nor should any other standards either. Decency is decent no matter who it's directed at.

You're talking about this like it's something new. Shill bidding has been happening since the dawn of time and I've been openly speaking out against it for over a decade on here myself, maybe even 15 years since I found out it was a common practice. As I've always said, I've personally never had a book shill bid even though I've had offers like "can I throw in a bid for you" and I always reply with "bid whatever you want to pay for it", but you can often tell which books are shill bid by how quickly prices rise early in an auction while mine seem to sit at low prices indefinitely. As far as the "imitation bubble" we've already seen that too, here with CGC slab tampering and other things. That's where my analogy about keeping your money safe came in a few days ago. People stored their money under their mattresses until it became unsafe to do so, and then started storing them in banks. Now it's on the banks to keep your money safe, and on the certification companies to keep your products free from fraud. ------------ Uncovering that ring is a great catch on your part, though. Bravo! As organizations build better mousetraps, the mice will continue to get smarter. The two things I would add that can improve on this is a) building better mousetraps and b) raising better children. Society's values are a reflection of incoming generations and we've become a society that is lackadaisical in putting in the effort to raise better quality children but then complain when society falters. In many ways, the older generations are responsible for it and the very reason we need better mousetraps. Why on EARTH would you blame two auction houses for practices that have been happening since the dawn of time? I can't imagine living a life where I see a boogeyman everywhere I look.

From everything I've read, the root problem to why the movie was a mess was that Fox needed to rush a film out to secure FF rights from reverting and this caused a lot of pressure on the entire project, including reducing time to find solutions to various problems along the way. Most of the other problems seemed to stem out of that time crunch (and yes, I'm aware of the trouble they had in dealing with Trank).

And I thought it was great even if the audience didn't love it.

It's going to be 14 years since the Wolfman (2010) movie once this one comes out. That's more than "a few years". How do you measure success? Wolfman roughly broke even against a $150MIL or so budget. Maybe it made $10-15MIL through video rentals. Blumhouse films, as I've repeatedly stated, are made on much smaller budgets because the employees and cast profit share rather than be paid in salary, keeping production costs way down. Invisible man only cost $7MIL to make and raked in over $140MIL, making it 20 X profitable. That's a success no matter how you slice it. Blumhouse movies are typically made on $5-20MIL budgets, that means if Wolfman (2024) rakes in 'only' $140MIL, or even 'only' $100 MIL, it's still going to be very profitable. And the dude is churning out films at an incredible pace. He's one of the hottest Hollywood movie making moguls on the scene right now.

Another Blumhouse product, which means odds are that this lowish budget film may actually turn out pretty good. The Invisible Man reboot was great. Blum has a knack for making a 'horror' movie very tactfully so it appeals to a much broader audience than slasher films and still gives enough suspense to keep you on the edge of your seat. It's almost like watching a 50's 'horror' film, but a much better contemporary version of it.

I'm already there!

That's a great post, and I agree with everything you said now that I understand where you're coming from. I come from an older time and stuff like this back in the 70's when I was a kid didn't even blip on the radar of the audience. You'd get a mention or something in the news, but that was it. My parents wouldn't go on and on about it or seek it out afterward. Everyone complains about what the media is doing, while fully participating in what they complain about. There's a dissonance there that's worth pointing out. Glad we could agree.

I think it's really hard to separate emotions from logic in large scale discussions about the hobby because the hobby is fundamentally based on emotion. Collecting is basically an emotional endeavor. Some people have vested interests in one direction or another, and they argue out of those vested interests. When I was much younger I used to be this way. I hated my wealthy family members and only focused on what I didn't have. I learned that it wasn't a good path and stopped thinking that way and started focusing on achieving things rather than being critical. It made all the difference to me. I ended up rising to the top of every industry I was in. Life is just a series of choices, and if you don't like your choices, change them, but you can't go blaming others for your own choices.

Social media has programmed society to be annoyed at everything. We should start a petition, because the Promise Pedigree needs a social justice thread to fight for it because it's so oppressed.

Using the logic he's using, NONE of the characters in any of the Marvel or DC movies are actual comic book characters.

Absolutely.

Other movie houses are doing it successfully. I've already mentioned Blumhouse more than once. I started a thread for this specific reason, to discuss how movie houses are profitable and how that is changing but moderation felt it wasn't worth approving the thread when in fact, it's actually a VERY good discussion to have because the landscape is changing drastically in the movie industry, the theater industry and everywhere in between. The industry is facing the largest upheaval it's ever faced and I suspect in a year or two we won't recognize it anymore. We're never going back to 2019 in many ways, and the movie industry is one clear example of this. Society's will has been broken and it's grown back entirely differently.

Joker was NOT a comic book movie and that was NOT The Joker. Dude, you'd argue the sky isn't blue. This is ridiculous now. If it wasn't a comic book movie, what was it?

If comics are following the same trends as all other collectibles, is it considered a hobby bubble or an economic bubble? And if it's an economic bubble, which it obviously was, why are people arguing the Promise books were a hobby bubble?