To think that Sony could have had something approximating that for a cool $25 million is fascinating. Disney bought Marvel for $4 billion in 2009, and now that looks like a steal. For a relative pittance more, we could be talking about Sony's Black Panther and the Sony Cinematic Universe. The first installment was the 1987 coin-operated arcade game titled simply Contra, followed by Super Contra in 1988 and then several sequels for home gaming platforms. The first three films were extremely commercially successful, and some of them were quite good, but what could have been has to have some people kicking themselves to this day. A video game series by Konami of run and gun-style shoot em ups. Marvel went on to sell the rights to Spider-Man alone for $7 million, and it's hard to argue that Sony got its money's worth. Wow! Hindsight makes fools of us all, but this cavalier response as told to author Ben Fritz for the book The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies (via Wall Street Journal) has to be extremely tough for Sony to look back at now. The highest-grossing video game franchise may have earned most of its money from merchandising, but Pokémon Red/Green/Blue/Yellow still ranks seventh among the top-selling video games of all time, topping out at 47,520,000 copies. Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man. The Top 10 Best-Selling Video Game Franchises of All Time.
Nobody gives a shit about any of the other Marvel characters. Yair Landau took the deal back to the brass at Sony who, as he recalled, responded thusly: Current Chairman and former CEO of Marvel, Ike Perlmutter countered by offering Sony the rights to nearly every Marvel character, including the likes of Iron Man, Thor, Black Panther and Ant-Man for, wait for it. At the same time, a Sony Pictures exec by the name of Yair Landau was looking to secure the big-screen rights to Spider-Man. Way back in 1998, Marvel Entertainment was looking for an influx of cash after the company emerged from the bankruptcy it filed two years prior.
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