Comic Book Resources recently got the chance to sit down with Tom Brevoort, Executive Editor at Marvel, where he talked about how involved publishing is with Marvel movies. He also talks about how involved Marvel is with franchises such as X-Men: First Class and The Amazing Spider-Man.
Said Brevoort:
Certainly we publish a lot of X-Men comics and a lot of Spider-Man comics. The difference is that – at least in publishing – on a day-to-day basis we're not even aware of what's going on with the film production on both of those characters. I've seen the "X-Men: First Class" trailers, and I know exactly as much about it as you do. Where as with the Marvel Studios films that we're doing ourselves, we're much more actively involved on a regular basis, and so there's a little more opportunity for cross-platforming and cross-integration. A lot of that also has to do with the fact that the Marvel Creative Committee – which includes Dan [Buckley] and Joe [Quesada] and a few other folks – are involved in giving notes and feedback to Kevin Feige and his guys. So there’s a more direct pipeline. Every once in a while, Brian Bendis will start talking about something in regards to an Avengers script, and it’ll take me a few seconds to realize “Oh! He’s had some previous conversation with someone who’s involved with one of the films, and he’s put forth an idea there that he also wants to explore in Avengers.”
The immediacy of the interaction is such that it’s more natural that those characters are going to come to the fore. I think regardless, if you’re doing a big film with any of the characters, they’re going to become bigger. And if you have a successful film as we did with “Iron Man,” well then Iron Man is almost immediately going to become a much more important, much more prominent Marvel character. That’s true regardless of what we do in Publishing, though I think we should certainly take advantage of that in Publishing and steer into that. As Marvel Studios gears up towards a major film, we’re going to know about it, and if we’re not doing a lot of stuff with the characters involved yet – though it’s not like we were ever not doing stuff with Iron Man, Thor or Captain America – it’s easier when we know what things are coming up to direct our efforts on them. We aim for the movie release time and make sure there’s an accessible, mainstream-friendly story that’s in a collection on bookstore shelves. And we make sure there’s enough exposure for those characters, to help prime the pump for the film release.
So I don’t think there’s any greater emphasis on the Marvel Studios characters than the ones optioned by other studios. If you look at our Previews catalogue, it’s not like we’ve taken our foot off the gas on X-Men or Spider-Man. We still publish plenty of both, and we still put the same kind of resources against those books as we do Iron Man or Thor. Those characters matter to us. It’s just a little easier to get behind Iron Man or Cap or the Avengers because we know more about what’s going on on the film side. More of us have read the script or seen the production designs, and that tends to get people excited about the possibilities.
X-Men: First Class is the next Marvel movie to come out, look for it in theaters on June 3, 2011.