Marvel:

Marvel sold Spider-Man for $7 million. Spider-Man now makes $1.9 billion per film.

They then mortgaged every remaining character to finance a film no one wanted.

In 1996, Marvel went bankrupt. Came out in 1998 with new owners, almost no cash and sixty years of characters it had no idea what to do with.

So it sold them. Spider-Man went to Sony for $7 million. X-Men and Fantastic Four went to Fox.

Sony's Spider-Man made $821 million in 2002. Marvel got a cheque for the licence fee. At 5% backend, that's roughly $41 million. Sony kept the other $780 million.

In 2003, a former talent agent named David Maisel walked into Marvel and asked a simple question: why are you collecting a fee when you could keep everything?

Two years later, they borrowed $525 million from Merrill Lynch. The collateral was ten Marvel characters. Iron Man. Thor. Captain America. Black Panther. If the films failed, it got the characters.

The first film was Iron Man. Multiple studios had passed on it. Jon Favreau pushed Robert Downey Jr through a screen test the board had rejected. The board reversed.

Iron Man made $585 million. Disney bought Marvel the following year for $4 billion.

Sony still owns Spider-Man.

The character Marvel sold for $7 million is still not theirs. The ten characters they nearly lost to a bank became the most valuable film franchise on earth.

Spider-Man made Sony rich. Spider-Man also told Marvel the exact model to run.

They just needed David Maisel and a $525 million loan to believe it.