Film ON AIR

Every other day Marvel gives out some facts about their future plans. Do they still have to learn or do they just not care. They own the rights to every comic book figure anyway, so who should they fear? Marvel Vice Chairman Peter Cuneo spoke about Marvel’s future ideas at the Wedbush Morgan Securities Conference.

He says ‘Iron Man’ showed them how they don’t have to use high-profile characters to make a big hit. “Iron Man shows that we can take our lesser known characters, reach into the storyline of our comic books and make them into valuable, really, “brands” for us. Each of these characters becomes a brand that we can market.“

Cuneo also prides Marvel for ‘creating the May 1 release date.’ “Marvel has created the “May 1st” release date, last year with Spider-man 3 and now with Iron Man. The motion picture industry really didn’t believe that would be a viable date for our types of films. So we’re very pleased with that as well,” he said.

And lastly, he noted how they could’ve released ‘Iron Man 2′ next year. “We could have, theoretically, Iron Man 2 in late 2009 but we want Iron Man 2 to be the highest quality film that we possibly can make so we’ve moved back 4 or 5 months to that May 1st timeframe in 2010 and we think that will have little impact overall on Marvel’s financials by doing that,” he said.

I think it was the right step for Marvel to start producing their own movies. And they seem to have the right balance between business and artistic ambition. They have a lot of respect for the characters they created, while other studios would only think about the business side of the deal.