Disney reportedly paid comic book creators $ 5,000 for adapted work



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    A general view of the Marvel Studios' Avengers: Infinity War screening at the Fox Theater on April 26, 2018 in Atlanta, Georgia.  It features the Marvel Studios logo on a screen and four Infinity Gauntlets in the shadows below.

No high-five here.
Photo: Paras Griffin / Getty Images (Getty Images)

Behind each of Marvel studios and DC Entertainment comic book adaptations are teams of comic book creators whose ideas were based the basics of what would ultimately become the movies and TV shows fueling the respective mega-corporations multi-billion dollar entertainment franchises. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that these creators are get paid anywhere near what they deserve.

It has been widely understood that most of the creators of the Big Two and mainstream comics are generally “pay for work” contractors who have no ownership rights to the intellectual property they create for publishers. Recently however, more and more comic book creators have spoken publicly about the experience of having their ideas capitalized on by some of the biggest corporate giants, only so that the creators themselves receive little or no financial profit generated by the properties derived from their work. While there have been plenty of stories about comic book creators who have chilled out both comic book companies and the movie studios they’ve been linked to, a new report from the Guardian explains in detail how the situations at Disney / Marvel and DC / Warner Bros./AT&T were particularly infuriating.

According to Guardian sources, Marvel’s standard approach to compensating writers or artists when their work appears in a Marvel Studios Movie is a fixed check for $ 5,000 along with an invitation to the film’s premiere. Writer Ed brubaker– who, along with artist Steve Epting, colorist Frank D’Armata and letterer Randy Gentile, designed the Captain America comics that defined the Winter Soldier – previously talked quite openly about how he hardly did anything character jump to the MCU in multiple movies and his own streaming series.

Brubaker also explained that he was not invited to the events of the premiere for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but the deepest problem with Marvel’s approach to paying creators whose work is tailored is that the studio wouldn’t make a point of making all of its talents known about the larger process. Apart from one-off checks and preview invitations, Marvel also offers a “special character contract” to certain creators guaranteeing different degrees of remuneration in the event of adaptation of their work. The problem is, these contracts are usually not offered to creators, which means that individuals have to take it upon themselves to apply for them, and there is no guarantee that the company will get away with it.

The Guardian article says: “For some creators, the work they did decades ago now provides a living income, as films bring their comics to a wider audience; they reason—and companies seem to agree-itis just to pay them more. DC has a standard internal contract, which the Guardian has seen, that guarantees payments to creators when their characters are used. Marvel’s contracts are similar, according to two sources with knowledge of them, but more difficult to find; some Marvel creators didn’t know they existed. How much is another story.

Either way, the way the companies making some of the most lucrative comic book adaptations handle pay creates a larger system of structural inequality in which some creators end up getting paid more – and some not at all – for their work than others. This is all because people in positions of power have not established well-defined and transparent pathways to obtain this type of compensation. Unlike actors, directors, etc. who have unions that help them fight for certain things, comic book creators are on their own and in many cases are hoping their grievances will be aired in public to draw more attention to the challenges facing them. they are faced.

Studios are digging deeper into their intellectual property catalogs to find source material to create even more movies and shows intended to draw audiences to theaters and corporate streaming walled gardens. There’s probably going to be a closer look at how comic book creators factor into the equation going forward, or whether businesses will just continue to operate as usual.


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