This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Marooned_00 on 2025-06-24 12:32:23+00:00.

Issue #1: All-New, All-Different, Giant-Sized Marvel

In 1997, the American comic book industry crashed due to a combination of plain bad writing, excessive pandering to collectors causing financial speculation, and the popping of the direct-market comic shop bubble. Many publishers closed down or were bought out, but two deserve special mention: DC Comics came out unscathed because it was owned lock, stock, and barrel by Warner Bros.; meanwhile Marvel Entertainment Group, the focus of this writeup and parent of Marvel Comics, went bankrupt.

Marvel, in particular, was in a horrible financial situation. They had to sell their recently purchased comic distributor, Heroes World, off to their only competitor Diamond Comic Distributors; their perpetual exclusive toy deal with Toy Biz was starting to weigh heavy; and there was a very real danger of Marvel’s characters being sold off to other companies.

However, Marvel’s chairman Ronald Perelman had a plan to get this company out of the red: most of their money would come not from comics or merchandising, but from movies. As a result, Marvel made a Hail Mary by selling off the film rights to their characters to the highest bidder, where the buyer could essentially do whatever they wanted with those characters. These were deals that Marvel could not afford to pass on, since they’d just gone bankrupt — Marvel was essentially giving up creative control over their characters in film to become solvent, which is a big deal for a publisher so historically controlling of its characters. Good thing Marvel already had a film producer on hand to help steer those film projects: Avi Arad, who had some television experience from a couple of Saban Entertainment cartoons — and the smash hit X-Men: The Animated Series, which was just wrapping up on Fox Kids.

The film rights to the characters were spread across God-knows-how-many production studios, but for the sake of this writeup, let’s focus on 20th Century Fox, which scored Daredevil, Fantastic Four, and most importantly, X-Men. Fox had some previous experience with the Children of the Atom, having co-produced not only the X-Men cartoon with Saban Entertainment, but also that hilariously bad Generation X TV movie.

Issue #2: God Loves, Man Kills

After a rocky, confusing production process, 20th Century Fox’s X-Men became a decisive box-office hit, essentially reinventing Charles Xavier’s pupils and their ideological opponents for the Y2K era. Naturally, Fox followed up on its success by greenlighting a sequel, while Marvel’s film division Marvel Studios got a slice of the profits — but oh no, it wasn’t enough to rest on the laurels of the success of this movie and Blade. Marvel wasn’t going to give up control of its characters so easily. One day they would take back what was theirs, and the first step was to cash in on the booming business of television.

In 2000, Marvel and Fireworks Entertainment announced Mutant X, an original series starring a visionary academic and his mutated pupils, while he protected them from a world they were persecuted and oppressed by. This was essentially another syndicated kinda-sorta-superhero teen drama riding on the coattails of Buffy the Vampire Slayer… specifically competing against The WB’s Smallville, set for premiere in 2001. Mutant X lasted for three seasons, before it was cancelled despite its actually pretty good ratings.

Let’s cut to the chase: Mutant X was a transparent attempt to cash in on the success of Fox’s X-Men movies by making an “X-Men TV show” with no X-Men characters, which started a chain reaction of lawsuits: Fox sued Marvel for breach of contract, the syndicator Tribune Entertainment sued Marvel for encouraging advertisements to make audiences connect the show to the movies… it was a whole shitshow that ultimately bankrupted the producer Fireworks Entertainment and got Mutant X cancelled.

You may be wondering: why is Mutant X so important that this post was titled after it?

Issue #3: House of M

Because at the same time this was Marvel’s attempt to break into the TV biz, it was also an attempt to circumvent their precarious licensing deal with 20th Century Fox. This wasn’t the first time Marvel had played legal fastball with the X-Men; they previously escaped taxes on toys resembling humans by arguing in court that mutants aren’t human. But now that Fox had trampled Marvel’s attempt to take a little detour from their late-90s deal, the Friends of Stan Lee realized they couldn’t back out of this deal any time soon, unless Marvel actively sabotaged their best-sellers, thus damaging the potential success of Fox’s films and allowing them to get the film rights back on the cheap…

From 2003 onwards, Marvel Comics began slowly sidelining their natural-born superheroes to push another team: the Avengers, a team whose claim to fame was giving a backstory to a WW2-era propaganda mascot. It began with 2004’s Avengers Disassembled arc, where the Avengers are torn apart; continued in 2005’s House of M, where the status quo was inverted so that mutants were persecuting humans; and went on through 2006’s Civil War, where we’ve all seen how Marvel Editorial tried hard to turn the Avengers into the new X-Men.

While the full details wouldn’t be known for a while, the spotlight turning to the Avengers would continue to shape the tone of the Marvel Universe. The Avengers’ push even extended to cartoons (with 52 TV episodes and three direct-to-DVD animated movies) and video games like the Ultimate Alliance series and an increased focus in Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Meanwhile, the X-Men were slooooooowly put on the bench… but no one really stopped caring about them, which only continued to drive ticket sales towards Fox’s movies.

Issue #4: Heroes Reborn

By the mid-2000s, the House of Ideas’s expansion into film was starting to lose steam. Aside from the great success of the first two X-Men movies and the even greater success of the Sam Raimi-directed Spider-Man movies, films based on Marvel characters were starting to get pretty bad: Fantastic Four, Daredevil and Ghost Rider weren’t great. All this, combined with the behind-the-scenes drama of X-Men: The Last Stand and Spider-Man 3, was getting on the nerves of Marvel higher-ups, and they could only see one reason why all this was going wrong: Avi Arad.

After helping ink the movie deals that got Marvel out of the red and co-producing all those awesome 1990s cartoons, Arad was seen as a nuisance who was less concerned with raising the Marvel brand’s profile than he was with setting up spin-off movies. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and Spider-Man 3 transparently tried to prop up spin-offs for the Silver Surfer and Venom respectively (which allegedly pissed off Marvel brass too), and the less we say about Elektra, the better. Around this time, Arad had also been in talks to sell a script for an Iron Man movie; allegedly, the script was awful, with an Iron Man that couldn’t fly and suited up from his toaster. With so much hot air flying from all directions, Arad had no choice but to quit Marvel.

This sent Marvel’s film plans all the way back to square one: all their biggest players were in the hands of outside studios and their lead producer was just gone, with no real roadmap to keep the Marvel brand in the public spotlight. As a result, Marvel decided to continue Arad’s plans for the Iron Man film entirely in-house, with Universal Studios distributing. It’s hard to believe it in Big 2025, but this wasn’t a guaranteed success: even with the Avengers’ continuing media push, Iron Man was far from an A-list character, and most comic fans who didn’t think the character was a robot hated him because of his characterization in the Civil War crossover. The director had zero experience with action movies, and the lead actor was considered a has-been tainted by his struggled with alcoholism.

Marvel Studios’s Iron Man released in May 2, 2008… to great box-office success and great critical and fan reception. Marvel used this movie as a springboard to launch a shared universe, much like the comics, leading up to the billion-earning Avengers movie in 2012. It can’t be overstated that this was a massive victory for Marvel: that billion at the box office was earned with no Spider-Man, no Fantastic Four, and no X-Men!

With Marvel’s then-recent acquisition by The Walt Disney Company, other film studios started trying to get in the ring and stand up against the Marvel Cinematic Universe: DC Comics tried to fast-track a shared universe of its own (and ultimately failed), Sony Pictures rebooted Spider-Man (and failed), and Fox went all-in on films for Marvel characters they did have the rights to (to mixed results).

But Marvel still wasn’t happy. Now that they had so much bargaining power, they still had to take back what Fox was a…

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1lj9voe/comic_books_mutant_x_a_brief_history_of_marvel/