New Book Reveals That Sony Could Have Bought Every Marvel Character For Only $25 Million
A new book reveals that Sony Pictures was once given the opportunity to buy nearly every Marvel superhero but turned down the offer for a very unexpected reason! Hit the jump to find out the full story.
Since Iron Man was released in 2008, Marvel Studios has produced hit after hit. While Spider-Man eluded Kevin Feige's grasp for quite some time, the failure of The Amazing Spider-Man franchise brought the wall-crawler home (on loan, at least) and it now appears as if Disney's acquisition of the Fantastic Four and X-Men is going to result in those characters meeting up with The Avengers too.
A new book by Ben Fritz titled The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies delves into the deal which saw Spider-Man become part of Sony's empire and it turns out that the studio made perhaps the biggest mistake in Hollywood history a good twenty years ago. In an excerpt from the book, it's revealed that a young Sony Pictures executive named Yair Landau reached out to Marvel to acquire the rights to Spider-Man during a time the company was having to sell its assets following bankruptcy.
Desperate for cash, Marvel boss Ike Perlmutter made a pretty surprising offer; Sony could have the movie rights to Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor, Ant-Man, Black Panther, The Avengers, and more for the bargain price of only $25 million. Landau rushed back to Sony's studio execs bt the response he received was not what he expected: "Nobody gives a sh—about any of the other Marvel characters. Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man." As a result, the wall-crawler sold for just $10 million.