Contracts, how do they work?

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>tfw you jew the jew

>>94840976
Marvel was on the brink of bankruptcy and starting their own movie studio didn't seem like a possibility.

They went all in.

I took one law class a long time ago, and it taught me only that I don't think like a lawyer and never will. Although you can look up everything specific about copyright law, you are unlikely to infer the actual form of copyright law from it.

For example, according to the letter of the law you can only copyright a particular expression of an idea, not the idea itself. That seems reasonable, since no story idea is very original. The most innovative story probably just has a few new elements added on top of ideas that been built up over centuries.

But then you get a case like Harlan Ellison vs. James Cameron, where Ellison sued Cameron because he said that "The Terminator" stole its ideas from a script for an "Outer Limits" episode that Ellison wrote in the early 1960s (the episode was called "Soldier," not "Demon with a Glass Hand," as is often reported). Ellison won this case, demonstrating that although technically you can't copyright an idea, judges and courts believe otherwise, which is all that really matters.

Every contract is different.

The FF one supposedly outlined the specific characters they were allowed to use. Presumably the same with ones like Daredevil and Ghostrider.

The "concept of mutation" isn't what they have the rights to, it's specifically Marvel's Mutants which is trademarked and copyrighted concept. They even sued Liefeld for making OCs that were too similar a concept to mutants. Every time Marvel creates a new mutant character, they trademark them under the X-Men franchise. It appears that Fox has the right to use any character in that franchise.

No one knows exactly how their contract works, though.

>>94841028
Perlmutter didn't even control the company until after they had sold the rights during the bankruptcy, memelord.

>>94841979
>Perlmutter didn't even control the company until after they had sold the rights during the bankruptcy, memelord.

And that's how you jew the jew. You beat him to the carcass.

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It's actually a bit of a myth that this deal was done to save Marvel from bankruptcy. It took place while they were still at the height of the boom.

Avi Arad and Ike Perlmutter, owners of Toy Biz, had just basically scammed their way into a controlling interest in Marvel, because their current owner, Bill Bevins, was an idiot. Perlmutter didn't give a shit about anything but the toys, so he wasn't involved.

Arad was also the one responsible for the X-Men cartoon that had been a big hit. Marvel had been shopping around their movie rights for a long, long time and having little success, because nobody saw that big of potential in the characters except Stan Lee and now Avi Arad. So Arad finally got a buyer with Fox.

They actually got essentially the same deal that Marvel had done with Toy Biz, where they would be the sole rights holder for this product basically in-perpetuity. The reasons this seemed like a good idea at the time were

1) Marvel had been unsuccessful in even getting anyone to buy the rights and the ones who did had bought them were not making the movies fast enough. The rights sales were relatively cheap, because the real money was going to be made back in merchandise and toy sales. This is why Arad and Perlmutter were desperate to sell the movie rights: they owned the toy manufacturer. The deal they signed with Fox basically meant they would have to get off their ass and get a movie in production immediately, not dragging their feet like the other companies.

2) At the time there was no possibility whatsoever that Marvel could ever have its own movie department. Signing a longterm deal with a big company like Fox ensured you would ALWAYS have X-Men movies coming out and thus toys to sell.

So this isn't quite the raw deal it's often made out to be. It only seems bad in retrospect because Marvel was bought by Disney.

>>94842643
Let's be honest, it's still not a terribly bad deal.

If they had the X-men rights, then it would just be Disney making bad X-men movies in-house, instead of the actually watchable movies they're making now.

>>94841252
Wow, I've never heard of this case.

Here's the Outer Limits episode in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_(The_Outer_Limits)

>Eighteen hundred years in the future, two foot soldiers clash on a battlefield. A random energy weapon strikes both, and they are hurled into a time vortex. While one soldier is trapped in the matrix of time, the other, Qarlo Clobregnny (Michael Ansara), materializes on a city street in the United States in the year 1964.

>Qarlo is soon captured and interrogated by Tom Kagan (Lloyd Nolan), a philologist, and his origin is eventually discovered. Qarlo has been trained for one purpose - to kill the enemy, and that is all he knows. Progress is made in "taming" him after Kagan translates his seemingly unintelligible language - "Nims qarlo clobregnny prite arem aean teaan deao" - into colloquial English..."(My) name is Qarlo Clobregnny, private, RM EN TN DO"; his name, rank and serial letters, which is what any soldier would reveal if captured by the enemy. After a short time in captivity, Qarlo comes to live with the Kagan family, despite the reluctance expressed by Tom Kagan's government associates.

>However, the time eddy holding the enemy soldier slowly weakens. Finally, he materializes fully, and tracks Qarlo to the Kagan home. In a final hand-to-hand battle, Qarlo sacrifices his life to kill the enemy and save the Kagan family.

Now, I'm not much of a Terminator fan, but this synopsis sounds almost nothing like the plot of The Terminator and in fact reminds me more of 12 Monkeys (since the "enemy" is implied to be bad and he was presumably sent from the future to save it, not ruin it).

>>94842750
It wouldn't hold quite as much weight if Cameron hadn't admitted, twice, one record, that he had "ripped off an old Outer Limits episode".

There's control and then there's control.
If FOX makes a movie about Wolverine being a compulsive masturbator and make Storm a slutty stripper for a Mojo-worthy attempt at comedy then those are clearly NOT the characters that Marvel comics made and everyone's only a lawsuit away from Marvel owning their X-Men movie rights again.
But if they make a bad movie about the Weapon X program kidnapping all the X-kids and turning Deadpool into a mouthless mutant amalgam of all their powers, that's just an incompetent good-faith effort to properly portray the mythology as it exists in the comics, and so a legit use.
FOX is actually handcuffed by the core elements of the X-Men comics. They can only make movies about the stories already told, using accurate depictions of the characters as they have been portrayed in the comics by Marvel.
Deadpool WAS a product of experimentation. Nobody said he had to as unsuccessful a product as he was in the comics.
But clearly they fucked up.
That said, there's a lot of leeway: *Logan* was nothing like a story about all the Marvel supervillains rising up together and Mysterio making Wolverine his bitch, BUT it was a movie that accurately reflected the emotional journey of a superhero finding his cause while in self-exile after failing to save his brethren.
Mixing in the Reavers and X-23 stories into the mix is also a relatively honest portrayal of their narratives as was depicted in the comics.
So you end up with something familiar and reminiscent if not 100% accurate.
They aren't allowed to stray any further than that.

>>94843801
Not true. Fox can do whatever they want with the characters.

The reason they don't is because, if you own the rights to the character Storm, and then just make her a talking banana, you're just wasting the rights you paid for when you could have just made that talking banana an original character you own.

However, Marvel usually also has the right of first refusal in these cases, and also usually has one of their own guys producing the movie. So they can say "change this" if they're getting too far off the mark.

>>94840976
They can, they just can't call them mutants. Freaks yes, in humans for sure but not mutants. That word (despite being a real word) is part of the Xmen branding. Marvel agree not to use it as part of their deal with fox. We don't know what's outlined in their contact but.

An independent party could probably get away with making a comic book with the exact same premise as Xmen, but you'll be pushing your luck if you called them mutants. call them shit like "enhanced or metahumans. No super hero stuff like fallout and Godzilla is fine but.

>>94844163
Don't pretend that Marvel doesn't have intellectual property rights here.
The portrayals of the characters in a movie directly affects the public perception of the comic properties.
If FOX devalues the characters with misrepresentation in bad faith it can be legally claimed that harm has been done to the value of Marvel's remaining intellectual property.
Thus FOX is legally limited to what Marvel has permitted portrayed before unless they want to risk liability for damages.

>>94840976
>the concept of mutation isn't an intellectual property.
The word "mutant" is though. Most likely that's what Fox owns in regards to Marvel films.

This is why Squirrel Girl was recently retconned out of her mutant origins. She was never a mutant but rather simply "girl with powers" and no other explanation given. And now Marvel can use her for live action.

>>94845944
>no other explanation given

You act like her then-preggers mother was never bitten by a radioactive squirrel while chewing on an acorn from an enchanted tree nearby a hunk of squirrel-themed meteorite.

>>94845944
No, not the WORD "mutant", the fictional CONCEPT "mutant". That's what they own.

Specifically the concept that inborn human mutation in extreme super-power themed variations will precede the next great evolutionary leap of humanity.
Other concepts of human mutation are still free to be used in other fictional works.
DC has a whole bunch of characters that were mutated or born mutated, but through different conceptual means from Marvel's mutants.
Even Marvel themselves have the concept of "mutates" that fulfills the literal dictionary meaning of mutant: Hulk, Spider-Man, and The Thing are all characters that have been mutated by radiation.
That's what they created that's different.

So whats this about Fox can't reboot?

>>94846845
Is it a reboot? Or is it a continuation of the story that began in the '90s?
I imagine the prequels and all their backstory reveals may eventually give people a reason or two to rewatch the original trilogy.