Burbank, Calif. - Nov 7, 2013—The Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS) and Netflix Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) today announced an unprecedented deal for Marvel TV to bring multiple original series of live-action adventures of four of Marvel’s most popular characters exclusively to the world’s leading Internet TV Network beginning in 2015. This pioneering agreement calls for Marvel to develop four serialized programs leading to a mini-series programming event.
It’s interesting to me that Marvel is doing this, given that they’re owned by Disney, which of course owns one of the big three broadcast networks and many cable channels. Also interesting that they appear to be calling the Netflix streaming service “the world’s leading Internet TV Network.” So now Netflix is a TV network?
DC hasn’t succeeded at much at all lately, really. Their comics are floundering, and any TV or movie successes (Arrow, Batmen & Superman movies) seem to be in spite of DC’s involvement.
Green Lantern had strong DC input, and we saw how that turned out. Although Smallville did have a lot of DC involvement towards the end of its run; was a few years ago, though.
Marvel is currently enjoying a good run with its movies. Outside of the last 5 - 10 years, though, they’ve been terrible. And even within those 5 - 10 years, you’ve had your Fantastic Fours and Daredevils.
DC has put out some quality animated movies. I think those have succeeded because they’re putting story first on them. Their movies seem to be concentrating on “toy-tastic,” as Joel Schumacher once said.
Hey! I liked Fantastic Four!
Anyway, if I were Marvel or Netflix, I’d be concerned about saturating the market with too much Marvel stuff. It makes it highly likely you’ll get veiwership fatigue.
This was a problem for the Star Trek canon when you had ST:NG, Voyager and DS9 all playing at the same time. (Well, maybe not all at the same time but there was some overlapping. Especially with DS9 and Voyager.)
Fair enough, but what’s the alternative? Strike while the iron is hot with Ant-Man – or the other guys maybe spark viewership fatigue with The Atom. Or make to cash in on the trend with, I dunno, Doctor Strange – before DC can stink up the joint with Doctor Fate or Doctor Occult or whoever. And so you authorize this project with Iron Fist – because, hey, Mister Terrific fights crime like a decathlon champ with half-a-dozen black belts whenever he isn’t drawing on his electrical bag of tricks, right?
I think Marvel’s franchise is better balanced than DC’s.
With DC you’ve got Batman, Superman, and everyone else. The top two characters overshadow all the rest. So studios concentrate on making Batman and Superman movies and TV series (which make the characters even more dominant) and when you try to expand into other characters, there’s relatively little interest.
With Marvel, there’s no dominant characters at the same level as Batman and Superman. Even the top characters like Spiderman or Wolverine or Captain America are still part of the crowd: no single character is bigger than the Marvel universe as a whole. So while you didn’t start with the same huge level of recognition, when you did start making movies and TV series, you didn’t run into the problem of having some characters overwhelm the others. You could introduce the characters individually and build up the entire universe.
My take is that it’s one more step toward Disney buying a majority stake in Netflix sometime in the next few years. Disney signed that exclusive deal with Netflix that start in 2015 (I believe) and that means that:
Star Wars
Indiana Jones
Marvel
Pixar
Disney’s animated library
The Muppets
Tron
will all ONLY be appearing on Netflix. To me, that’s Disney preparing to be a monster in the streaming market. Instead of launching their own, they’ll simply buy a big one. They’ve got the money and they’ve got the intellectual property. Netflix has the audience and the streaming service but is vulnerable to other services with exclusive deals and more original content (though they’re working on that).
