Following the completion of their acquisition of Marvel on New Year’s Eve, it seems Disney also wants to be in business with everything the comic company has ever touched, particularly Stan Lee. Although Lee himself hasn’t worked for Marvel since the early 90s, he is reponsible for many of their classic characters, such as The Hulk, Spider-man and many of the X-Men.
More recently he’s been behind POW! Entertainment (Purveyors Of Wonder), which has worked on developing new characters (largely supeheroes), which it can champion in comics, on TV and in films. However, while it’s released a few straight-to-DVD animated films, it’s mainly been developing fresh superheores which have yet to be seen (POW! says it has 20 new franchise characters in active stages of development and another 40 to be introduced – such as Blaze, Nick Ratchett and Tigress),
For a couple of years, POW! has had a first look deal with Disney. While nothing has actually been turned into a film or TV series from this deal yet, it seems the House Of Mouse has great faith in Stan Lee, as THR reports that it’s just taken a 10% stake in POW!, which also includes ‘enhanced rights’ to the company’s creations.
Although it isn’t clear what these ‘enhanced rights’ are, it seems that it’s similar to what Marvel thought Disney could do for them, in that the studio has immense expertise in launching and steering franchises across a broad range of media, from TV and film through to merchandising. It seems Disney feels POW! could become a very beneficial partnership, and it’s also likely they’d want Lee on-board to consult on their plans for Marvel (as well as creating characters, he used to run the comic company), as well as to create new characters across their film and TV portfolio.
With studios running out of known comic characters to make new films out of, getting behind the man who created many of the classics and is now actively trying to come up with many more new ones isn’t a bad idea, especially with Disney actively pursuing the young male market which they feel they’ve lost.