Marvel takes control of movie making

More control, more money.

Until now, Hollywood’s major studios have paid to license Marvel characters to create blockbuster franchises — including the three “Spider-Man” hits, which have raked in close to $2.5 billion at the global box office for Sony Pictures — and 20th Century Fox’s “X-Men” and “Fantastic Four” movies. The latest, “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer,” took in an estimated $57 million in its opening this weekend.

But Marvel makes relatively little money from these box-office bonanzas, because of unfavorable deals struck in the 1990s. A Lehman Brothers analysis calculated that Marvel made just $62 million from the first two “Spider-Man” films.

By making his own movies based on other Marvel characters, Mr. Maisel hopes to transform his division of Marvel Entertainment into a true filmmaking brand, maintaining control from script to release, keeping all the profits for the company and building a film library, while using someone else’s capital.

Paramount Pictures will market and distribute the movies, for a fee. (Universal Pictures, which made 2003’s “Hulk” by the director Ang Lee but sold back the rights to Marvel after its poor box-office performance, will handle that sequel.)

The financial model seems unusually favorable. Because most of the financing raised by Merrill Lynch (the $465 million revolving credit facility) is insured by Ambac Assurance, Marvel is not liable to repay its senior creditors if the movies tank. The Ambac deal uses the comic characters as collateral and thus requires no capital outlay by Marvel.