Gareth S. Young - - 1000 Trillion Suns

...Groot! Cashing in In 1996, barely twenty years ago, Marvel was in big financial trouble. In an attempt to cash in on their large inventory of characters, they made several licensing deals with different movie studios. Universal snatched up the Hulk, Fox grabbed the X-Men and Fantastic Four, and Sony bid highest for the Spider-man rights. Several lackluster movies were made over the next few years and many of the rights reverted back to Marvel. Hulk, Punisher, Daredevil and Blade foremost amongst the returning heroes. Marvel comes back to life By 2008, Marvel were on a stronger footing and ready to attempt a launch of their own movie studio. Since the licensing of Marvel's big guns (Spider-man and the X-Men) was still owned by other companies, Marvel decided to use Iron Man to launch the studio. Not only was Iron Man a huge success, but Marvel enjoyed a long string of successes after it, including a little known property set in space called Guardians of the...

Every summer, the movie studios release what they call "tentpole" movies. Normally, these are big-budget, effects-driven franchise movies, designed to prop up the studios and make them their profits for the year. I call them programmed franchises because they're not acquired with one movie in mind. The philosophy from the start is to produce at least a trilogy. So much money is invested in these movies that failure can cripple a studio. Trivia Blast!! - New Line Cinema had to merge with its parent company Warner Bros after the (relative) failure of  The Golden Compass:   Budget: $180M  Box Office: $70M ( The Golden Compass  was intended to follow the trilogy of His Dark Materials books by Phillip Pullman) Jaws   Stephen Spielberg is sometimes credited with creating the first summer "Blockbuster" movie with  Jaws .  Jaws  was the first movie to be distributed with a "wide release," meaning that it opene...