On its way to becoming the most successful movie franchise in history, and making a slew of B-list comic book characters the biggest “can’t miss” proposition no one saw coming, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has also served as an unusually in-depth look into how the sausages are made in these kinds of adaptations. From the beginning, people were asking when some of Marvel’s bigger names would be added to the mix, and most were quite surprised to find that they actually couldn’t be at first. It’s a long, complicated story involving a ton of lawyers and copyright ephemera, but what it boils down to is that, as hard as it is to believe, Marvel Comics came dangerously close to going out of business in the mid-1990s, and as a Hail Mary play licensed the rights to their biggest names to other companies to do whatever they wanted. This is how we got stuff like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, Tim Story’s Fantastic Four two-fer, and of course the still-ongoing X-Men films from Fox. Marvel and Fox may be ready to share their characters
