Sean Callagy

So with Marvel though...

At that point, they're licensing out X-Men, they're licensing out Spider-Man, and what

they were saying is they were gonna make relatively little money after all the things, and they had very little creative control.

Am I hearing that correctly?

Exactly.

And because they would license to different studios, those properties were siloed in each of those studios, so you couldn't bring the characters together.

and create an Avengers movie or create a connected universe.

And so the big vision was as a Marvel fan and as somebody who wanted to make big movies and somebody who wanted them to make money, that the way to do it would be to get the rights back as much as possible, take the characters that had not been licensed.

At that time, nobody wanted Thor.

or Captain America, or this thing called Avengers.

People would tell me, Thor's in the public domain.

We don't need you for that.

Or Avengers means some UK English spy series.

They didn't quite get it.

And so that was great because I had those properties to work with.

Iron Man was actually at Warner Brothers for about eight, nine years as a license deal for like $50,000 they paid.

And they never thought it was worthy to make it into a movie.

And they didn't see it.

People ask me about that, but they just let it sit there.

So eventually, they let the rights run out, even after I announced Marvel Studios.