Mighty Marvel Movies?

This month, Business 2.0 magazine features an article about Marvel Entertainment's plans to produce its own movies about its superheroes who have not been previously licensed out (and at least one, The Hulk, whom the studios don't want anymore). The reason? Marvel says it's only been receiving pennies on the dollar from the success of movies like the Spider-Man and film series, which have reaped cosmic-sized bucks worldwide. If it seizes the means of production, it stands to reap the majority of grosses from the flicks. To accomplish this, Marvel borrowed around half a billion dollars, in an elaborate deal that uses the characters themselves as collateral. One problem is that Marvel's most iconic characters -- Spidey, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Daredevil -- are licensed out. Even characters like Ghost Rider, Iron Fist, and (ahem) Man-Thing are either in the process of being turned into movies or have already been flickerized. True, the Blade movies have been successful using a third-banana character from the Tomb of Dracula comic. But will Marvel have the same success with Nick Fury (a James-Bond-like character, already turned into a bad Fox TV-movie starring David Hasselhoff), Ant-Man (whose chief claim to fame in the media is a sketch on Saturday Night Live, with Garrett Morris as the little guy), or Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu (who's, y'know, a master of kung-fu)?

Further, articles like this seem to ignore that Marvel had its own studio in the eighties. Marvel Animation made a few attempts at exploiting the company's comic-book characters (Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, a Hulk cartoon, and an unsold pilot for an series); but had its greatest success licensing toy lines. Its Transformers and G.I. Joe cartoons transfixed millions of baby-busters.