Stan “The Man” Lee is suing Marvel comics for a cut of the pie on the Spider-Man movie profits. In so doing, he joins a raft of other comics creators from the 50s and 60s who have tried to make a little money on creations they made, generally as “work for hire.” Such suits have rarely been successful, except to the extent that they’ve produced a moral suasion to rectify the extra-legal injustice.
(Remember that, next time media companies go on about Intellectual Property as being necessary to protect creators. Creators are generally screwed by the financiers, and those are the folks that IP law tends to protect. Not that there isn’t some justice in doing so, of couse, but let’s not let the matter be over-sentimentalized.)
Of course, as Art Buchwald could have told him, Lee’s being a fool to sue for 10% of the Spidey movie profits. No matter what happens, that movie will never actually show a profit on paper; no movie ever does, so as to avoid taxes (and payments to folks who negotiatiated a share of the profits).
What’s sort of interesting about this was that a few weeks ago, I watched a rather unfocused 60 Minutes II segment on Marvel comics in the movies. Lee was on screen for much of the time, waxing eloquent and enthusiastic about Spider-Man, Daredevil, the Hulk, and so forth, all current or future movie projects. He’s been a hell of an ambassador for Marvel, grossly underpaid just for all the goodwill he produces.
Then the interviewer asked him about whether he was making any money off of Spidey (nope, not one thin dime). And then pressed him about how he felt about it. Clearly he was unhappy, but just as clearly he wasn’t inclined to air the dirty laundry in front of the nation. That’s generally been his MO; he gets treated with respect, he gets to work on behalf of the characters he created and loves, and he doesn’t bitch about Marvel.
Perhaps what pushed him over the edge was seeing the cuts back to Avi Arad, one of the high Marvel honchos, on the set of Daredevil, telling the reporter that Lee had, of course, been compensated “fairly.”
That comment might come back to haunt him.
This story has details a little differently. It claims that Lee already had a 10%-of-net deal, and that he’s suing, a la Buchwald, because Marvel claims there ain’t no net (nor is there ever likely to be, in the Looking Glass world of film finance).