Sylas
<Gold Donor>
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Just saw Deadpool with the GF.
Can someone give me the tl;Dr on all the 20th century Fox jokes and stuff? Seems like marvel bought a bunch of DC characters and.....20th century Fox is getting out of the comic game?
I don't read comics and I don't follow any of this stuff
You really need a primer on the formation of the MCU? Prolly trolling but ok here goes:
In the 90s marvel comics were going bankrupt and so they began licensing their IP to various movie studios to stay afloat. Characters like the Hulk were licensed to Universal, Spider-man (and his villains) to Sony Pictures, The X-Men (and mutants in general) to 20th Century Fox, etc.
The first of these projects was the X-men animated series but there were several other cartoons that were modestly successful in this time frame but these did not produce a ton of revenue for Marvel itself.
In the late 90s the first successful Marvel Movie was released, Blade, a half-vampire character who had been licensed to New Line Cinema (later absorbed by WB, who does own DC). This was a shot in the arm of revenue for the floundering comic book publisher and its success convinced studios that superhero films were viable again (Several disastrous Batman sequels to the original tim burton films had convinced studios that super hero films were dead). This lead to later live-action movies such as the X-Men, Spider-man, Fantastic Four, etc and some stinkers like Daredevil, Elektra, punisher, etc throughout the earlier 2000s.
All of this revenue for Marvel along with seeing some of the shittier interpretations of their beloved characters led to Marvel starting their own production studio. They started to look through their catalog to see what characters they had left since they had already licensed all of their popular series out to rival studios. The only real characters of any note were some b-tier characters called the Avengers, so they went to work on making origin story films for these characters starting with Iron Man.
As the MCU films became more successful they began negotiating for the rights to some of their other characters back, they had a complicated relationship with Universal over the rights to the Hulk (He was allowed to be in team movies, but any solo picture rights remained with Universal). As these movies began to become more popular Disney ended up acquiring Marvel Studios (their main rival WB owned DC) and then they really began to negotiate for their characters back. After the success of the first Avenger's film and they started raking in the cash (and a couple of shitty Amazing Spiderman films managed to lose a bunch of money) they struck a deal with Sony to share the Spider-man character, although sony maintains the rights to Spider-man's ancillary characters and have produced a bunch of garbage films featuring them such as venom, morbius, madam web, etc.
Eventually the MCU made Disney enough money that they just outright purchased 20th Century Fox, which gave them the rights back to their most successful comic book characters, namely the X-men, mutants, and the Fantastic Four.
TLDR: All the cameo characters featured are Marvel characters, Marvel didn't buy any DC characters, Marvel's parent company Disney bought 20th century Fox
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