Disney owns Marvel Comics, and, thus, calls the shots when it comes to filming an adaption.
So why doesn’t Disney release any of Marvel adaptions through it’s own studios?
The MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe…Avengers, Iron Man, Captain America, etc.) through Paramount.
The X-Men through 20th Century Fox.
The Fantastic Four through Universal.
Blade through New Line Cinema.
Come again? The MCU is produced by Marvel Studios.
Disney does not own Paramount (Global, formerly ViacomCBS). It has used Paramount Global for distribution of at least some of the MCU films because of its international distribution networks and agreements. In general, distribution and marketing is separate from production, and many of the big “studios” have very little to do with production aspects of filmmaking.
As for the rest, the cinematic rights for a number of the characters and teams were sold by Marvel at various times. For instance, the X-Men rights were sold to 20th Century Fox, which also managed to acquire the film rights for the Fantastic Four characters (then owned by Constantin film, which is why the low budget Roger Corman-produced1994 Fantastic Four film was made before they hit a sunset clause). The same for Blade and New Line Cinemas, which is now owned by Warner Bros. (which sold back the rights because it is heavily invested in DC Comics).
Universal never had rights to the Fantastic Four but it did have rights to The Incredible Hulk, and intended to make a film franchise around that character until the terrible reception of the 2003 Ang Lee-directed film. They back-licensed the character to Marvel Studios for the 2008 Incredible Hulk film but retained distribution rights (hence, the limited availability of the film and why it wasn’t available on Disney+ streaming for a long time).
You missed Spider-Man (and his various rogues), who was licensed out to Sony Pictures, and was only back-licensed to Marvel Studios for use in the Avengers sequels and stand-alone films in exchange for a highly favorable and contentious profit-sharing deal with Sony and then studio head Amy Pascal (who still retains personal rights to the Spider-Man characters).
All of this is why Marvel Studios had to build their franchise around second and third tier characters like Thor, Iron Man, Ant Man, the Guardians of the Galaxy, et cetera. (Captain America isn’t really a second tier character but was largely regarded as anachronistic, which the first Captain American film really leaned into so hard it became almost a self-parody, albeit in an entertaining way.) Disney has been working hard (and paying through the nose) to get all of the rights to recognizable Marvel characters back under their aegis, hence their purchase of 20th Century Studios in 2020 to get the properties sold to that studio.
Stranger
I had about four paragraphs ready to go and then got ninja’d by @Stranger_On_A_Train but ah well, your explanation was better phrased than mine would have been.
The joint ownership of various characters is a weird kink in all of this. You covered Spider-Man and his godawful spinoff movies (I suspect Kraven will be the final nail in the coffin for those, which sucks because I really wanted a Black Cat movie eventually) but The Hulk is also an interesting tale. As I understand it, Universal still owns the rights to the character, but under the arrangement with Marvel Studios he can appear in any of the movies or TV shows under the Disney banner. But…only as a supporting character, part of a team, or a cameo. If Marvel wants to do another actual Hulk movie, which isn’t likely as the 2008 one was one of the lowest-grossing in the MCU, Universal gets to release it themselves.
Anything you need to know about the tortuous history of getting Marvel comics onto film and building the universe that conquered Hollywood can be found in MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales & Gavin Edwards.
The book is not about the movies themselves but the men in suits, creative directors, producers, and backstage miracle workers who fought constantly with an amazing set of idiot billionaire studio owners to put on screen movies about characters that nobody had previously wanted to see. The wars between the various studios involved, each of whom was damned if they let their rivals succeed for one second, inadvertently explains our current political standoffs.
The three reporters obviously devoted years of their life to this immense project, with the expectation that Marvel would continue soaring to even greater worldwide glory. And then the Avengers story ended, all the stars left, the new projects got terrible reviews, the volume of movies and tv shows overwhelmed both attempts at quality and the audiences capacity for understanding the MCU, and Keven Feige, who was the driving creative force behind twenty years of climbing that mountain, got kicked upstairs with nobody obvious to take his place. You can almost hear the air rushing out of the final chapter as the book deflates.
Disney has been untangling the skein of studio connections and pulling in all the players so that it has control over just about everything, even if others do some of the work. Feige lost the battle when his higher-up protectors themselves got pushed aside. Hard to feel sorry for a guy whose titles are only the President and Chief Creative Officer of Marvel Studies, but in Hollywood that and twenty dollars will get him a smoothie at Erewhon.
And if I had been, at the time a Sony share-holder, I would have seriously shopped a class-action for self-dealing by an officer of a publicly traded corporation. That deal was unconscionable and has arguably cost Sony (and its shareholders) a metric fuck-ton of money. I really have no idea why nobody has challenged it.
I was gonna say, Captain America is my favorite superhero and if you call him second or third tier I will fight you.
(My second-favorite is Doctor Strange but he’s pretty obscure so I don’t blame anyone for not considering him top tier, that’s totally fair.)
And it’s no surprise that the X-Men and Spider-Man were done outside of the MCU because those are big names in Marvel. The Avengers, not so much; they were big back in the day (Silver Age) but lost popularity to other titles that embraced the '80s-'90s “grimdark/gritty/anithero” ethos. It should come as no shock that many of the artists and writers who worked on those titles in that era went on to form Image Comics (itself very successful).
I’m no comic book expert but back in the late ‘60s to early ‘70s I read my fair share. My recollection has been that DC was more the world of solid heroes, even Batman, and that while we had no concept of grimdark, Marvel was the world of troubled complex superheroes. Peter Parker was jealous of his own alter ego; Daredevil was quite a troubled man; so on.
Absolutely, in the Silver Age that was a big difference between them. I think they all jumped on the bandwagon later; I distinctly remember the “Death of Superman” storyline and that was definitely veering into the realm of grittiness. That seemed to be the tone that DC was setting at the time.
But for the most part, yes, in the Silver Age DC was about heroic “gods among men” standing against darkness, and sometimes veering into goofiness. Much more kid-friendly 4 color stuff. Marvel was trying to be more adult and complex. DC was aiming at the younger kids, Marvel at the college kids. (Or at least, those were the audiences that they captured.)
Not that it was universal. DC rather famously used some of their titles to try to address more adult themes, the best example might be the Green Arrow/Green Lantern pairing. Green Arrow was more of a counter-culture, “screw the man” kind of character (befitting of his Robin Hood inspiration) while Green Lanter was more of a “law and order” kind of character (befitting a magical space cop) and that dichotomy reflected the attitude of the US at the time. And they also took on the complication of drug abuse in that series, with Green Arrow’s sidekick Speedy becoming hooked on heroin.
But generally, yes, Marvel had the more mature titles, with DC being more kid-friendly. Though again in the 80s they both went the same direction and have been like that since.
Note that I admit to a bit of pro-Marvel bias, as that is what I grew up reading. I didn’t really start to appreciate DC until I was an adult, and today I am a huge fan of DC as well. But I’m definitely more of a Marvel fanboy at heart.
Captain America was kept off the big screen for years because of litigation by the Joe Simon estate; not because he is a B-List character.