What was wrong with the Mummy?

At the time, Marvel Studios consisted of a handful of staffers in a small office on Santa Monica Boulevard who were writing script notes for films made by the major studios. New Line had done well with Blade in 1998, Fox hit a home run with X-Men in 2000, and Sony had an even more massive hit with Spider-Man in 2002. "You didn't make that much money from the movie as a licensor, but you normally keep half of the consumer products [revenue]," says Maisel. That enabled Marvel, which had been in bankruptcy just a few years earlier, to recover its financial health.

But Maisel says he knew from his time at Disney that the company still had a lot of potential. So he reached out to Arad, then the studio chief, who had teamed with fellow Israeli Ike Perlmutter a few years earlier to win control of Marvel Entertainment when the company emerged from bankruptcy. By 2003, a profile in USA Today described Arad as "rolling in dough and clout" in the wake of the early hits. Arad was passionate about and protective of the characters, vetoing a scene in an early Spider-Man script that would have had the hero slashing someone's throat. When Maisel approached claiming he could improve Marvel's returns, Arad arranged for him to meet the notoriously press-shy and tightfisted Perlmutter.

That meeting took place at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. At minimum, Maisel said he thought he could negotiate a bigger share of the box-office gross than the 5 percent or less the company had been getting.

Shortly thereafter, Maisel was hired as president and COO of the studio. As Maisel tells it, Feige then was a relatively junior executive giving script notes to studios. Maisel describes himself as Feige's boss at the time but also his friend and says the two had late-night talks about what the future could be. Feige and Marvel declined comment.

Maisel says he had long before begun to ponder what would happen if Marvel owned its movies and could mix characters together as had been done in the comics, "so that each movie could become a lead-in to the next, and, basically, after the first movie, they're all sequels or quasi-sequels." Maisel says he was "very much inspired" by George Lucas' strategy on Star Wars: "If we could do movies similar to the box-office average of the [Marvel films] that had been released or even a haircut to those, significantly, Marvel could be worth in the billions."
Maisel says the company's focus was on licensing other characters, "the more movies, the better because there's more consumer products to sell." Soon after he started, the company was poised to license Captain America to Warner Bros. and Thor to Sony. "If I had gotten there three months, six months later, those deals would have been done," he says. "And there would be no chance to bring all these characters together." Spider-Man already was at Sony, and Iron Man had been idling at New Line. ("They thought it was a lousy property," says Maisel.) Hulk was at Universal, which had made one semi-successful film.

Maisel lobbied to block the Captain America and Thor deals. "Ike will challenge your argument and your logic in a tough way sometimes, but he will listen, and eventually I convinced him to support what I needed to do to at least try to make a studio," he says. As an early proof of concept, Maisel says he made a deal with Lionsgate to do low-budgeted animated Iron Man and Avengers movies that would go direct to DVD. Lionsgate financed the films for a distribution fee and half the profit. "It allowed me to say to people: 'Look at the value of our IP. Here's someone paying all the money, and we have creative control and get half the profits,' " says Maisel.

As Maisel pressed for Marvel to own its live-action movies, Perlmutter and the board told him to give it a shot as long as Marvel wouldn't have to put up a dime. For the next year, Maisel says he worked on a way to execute. In April 2005, Marvel announced Merrill Lynch would provide $525 million and allow Marvel to greenlight any movie up to $165 million as long as it was rated PG-13. Marvel would put up no cash and assume no risk. "Too good to be true," boasts Maisel.

The collateral was the movie rights to 10 characters: Captain America and something vaguely called the Avengers at the high end, dwindling to Shang-Chi and Power Pack. The plan was to make four movies. Marvel would collect a 5 percent producing fee on each before the banks could recoup, and keep rights to merchandise and video games. "We would have been no worse off in failure than if we just licensed those deals," says Maisel. Marvel had to find a studio to distribute the films and commit to spending hundreds of millions on marketing, but the past performance of the Marvel movies made that seem reasonable. (The distributor would receive a percentage of box office and be first in line to recoup its costs.) Marvel's first stop was Universal, but as talks dragged, the deal went to Paramount.