What the DC deal means to Marvel

By Stephen Tramontana on March 2nd, 2010

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Jack Donaghy would be proud of DC Entertainment today, they finally got their synergy down.

For the last decade it seemed DC was stuck in arrested development. Not creatively, of course, but in their market structure. DC EIC Dan DiDio would constantly deflect convention questions about DC film properties, reminding the audience that he was in the print business. He would offer the same response when people would ask why DC had not embraced digital distribution in the way that Marvel, Dark Horse, Image, and other comic publishers had.

It seemed in a changing world, DC was stubbornly holding onto the old model, even though they were better equipped to branch out then Marvel was. Well that all changed  with last month’s stunning announcement that both Jim Lee and Dan DiDio were promoted to co-publishers, and Geoff Johns made the inevitable transition into their corporate brain trust (that was actually the least surprising part of the announcement)

Gail Simone said it best that she felt the announcement of DC Comic’s realignment was like “waking a sleeping giant.”

Along with DC’s in-house talent, President Diane Nelson, EVP of Sales and Marketing John Rood, and VP of Finance Patrick Caldon, are ready to show Disney/Marvel how they do things downtown. What does that mean? DC Comics is no longer just the “publishing business.” In a joint statement, DiDio and Lee wrote “our mission is to reinvent DC Comics to prepare it for the challenges and opportunities in this quickly changing world.” Johns echoed that sentiment in his statement. His job, besides writing, will be to “embrace (comics) and use it to lead the creative charge on bringing it all to film, toys, television, video games, animation, and beyond … Justice Society on Smallville was just the beginning.”

So now the question is, how does this affect Marvel, and their new parent Disney? It puts them on point that DC just became serious competition outside the publishing space for the first time in almost two decades. The problem that Marvel has is that, while DC and Warner share the same house, Marvel is all over the neighborhood. So while their revenue stream should be fine, strategically they can’t be as competitive until they pull everything back under the Disney/Marvel Studios banner.

The Disney licensing apparatus is just as strong–if not stronger–than Warner Brothers. And Disney obviously has no problem exploiting characters. But Rich Ross and Kevin Feige are no Lee, DiDio, and Johns. At the end of the day, this is about monetizing a library. And while Marvel boasts that they have a “library of over 5,000 characters,” they’ve only really utilized a handful of them. And that is something that starts at the comic book publishing level. To their credit, Marvel has tried to up the face value of characters like Nova, Deadpool, and Spider-Woman. But over the last decade, DC has been on a roll, reintroducing characters like the Justice Society, The Green Lantern Corps (including Hal Jordan, oddly) and Mera.

That’s right. Aquaman’s main squeeze. When you can make Mera cool, you know you’re on the right track.

Another problem is that film is still the driver of character awareness. Although Iron Man seems to be in good shape, it’s TBD on the other Marvel Studios properties. Hulk’s reboot was lukewarm at best. And Thor and Captain America are far from sure bets outside of the party faithful. If those two underperform, what’s the future of the long-planned Avengers movie? Unlike Warner, all Marvel’s heavy hitters (and not so heavy hitters honestly), are locked in at different studios for the foreseeable future. And when Fox is rushing a reboot of Daredevil, they’re serious about keeping it that way.

The true winners here are the comic book fans. Between these two deals, I think we’re about to enter a golden period of comic book adaptations – which is hard to imagine after the last ten years. But just as DC took a page from the Marvel playbook, Marvel Studios needs to look at what DC has been doing between page and screen. Until they can get back Spidey, The Fantastic Four, and the X-Men, they’re going to need to put some serious muscle behind developing that library of 5,000 characters.