Superhero Movies and TV Shows Take Over the World

“It’s all there in the source material. Our success means that people can stay true to the source material. I think history has shown that the closer you stay to the spirit of the comics, the better. Comics fans are passionate for a reason: because the material is pretty darn good.”

—Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios

“Fuck Marvel!”

The words echoed across New York’s Beacon Theatre, eliciting gasps and cheers from the thousands assembled for the August 2016 premiere of Suicide Squad.

Director David Ayer had taken the stage moments earlier to introduce the highly anticipated Warner Bros. Batman spinoff and had begun by saying the experience of making Suicide Squad had been “the best of his career.” He was moving on to the requisite Hollywood platitudes—thanking production president Greg Silverman—when it happened. An overzealous member of the audience, perhaps jacked up from being moments away from seeing Margot Robbie in tight shorts, screamed out, “Fuck Marvel!”

On stage Ayer paused, then gripped the microphone and hollered back, “Fuck Marvel!” to cheers and bemused laughter.

At the time Ayers’s outburst appeared ill advised. When the negative reviews for his movie started flooding in (aggregator Rotten Tomatoes awarded it an anemic 26 percent), it looked downright stupid. But foolish or not, Ayers’s declaration gave public voice to one of the most high-profile—and lucrative—battles in Hollywood. Superheroes, in case you haven’t noticed, have taken over pop culture, and with their ascension the long-simmering rivalry between Marvel and DC has been taken to another level.

Just like in print, this new billion-dollar battle plays out with each company bringing to the table various institutional strengths and weaknesses as well as oppositional philosophies.

Marvel does things one way, DC does things another, and viewers are left to vote with their dollars, euros, and (increasingly) their yuan as to which vision, characters, and universe they prefer. This is where the battle is playing out most fiercely nowadays—on the movie and TV screens around the globe. And the shift in arenas came not a moment too soon.

Monthly comic books are becoming an increasingly endangered product, catering to a smaller and smaller group of hardcore hobbyists. For superheroes to survive, they were going to need to find another outlet. Writer Grant Morrison theorized that paper comics were simply a step in a long journey for the concept of superheroes, a “first-stage rocket” that had to be jettisoned to reach greater heights.

“The definition of a meme is an idea that wants to replicate,” Morrison told Rolling Stone. “And [superheroes have] found a better medium through which to replicate.”

The answer was movies.

Superhero movies have definitely brought these characters to another stage. They’re now the hottest thing going, with a popularity that shows few signs of diminishing. The genre raked in some $1.9 billion in 2016 alone and accounted for nearly 17 percent of movie market share (compared to just .3 percent twenty years earlier). There are now so many superhero movies that characters who can barely sustain their own print comic book are being tapped to launch potential film franchises. As recently as 2005 a big-budget Aquaman movie was considered so absurd that the makers of HBO’s behind-the-scenes Hollywood comedy Entourage turned it into a running joke for the whole season. Now it’s going to be a reality.

This newfound domination by costumed characters is a truly shocking turn of events. Growing up as a comic book fan in the 1980s and 1990s meant existing in a state of simultaneous optimism and frustration, as big-time projects were announced, before inevitably fading into oblivion without any explanation. Fanzines, including Comics Scene, ran regular columns devoted to short updates on the scads of comic book adaptations in development. A 1988 edition lists in the works a tantalizing array of never-consummated deals, such as a Sgt. Rock movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Thor sitcom, and a Silver Surfer live-action film.

These projects all seem plausible now, but back then the idea of high-profile projects based on comic books was almost inconceivable.

Even less so for Marvel properties.

“I smell a lot of Marvel bitches up in here!”

—Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson at the 2016 MTV Movie Awards

“We were trying to pick a DC vs Marvel fight. But Marvel’s brilliant successes kicks our ass.”

—Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson later on Twitter

When it came to film and television the company had suffered so many failures and misfires that it was not considered a particularly premium brand. Its ignominious track record had left Marvel pulling up the rear behind DC—in spite of Stan Lee’s best efforts. He’d left New York for California in 1980 and devoted himself almost exclusively to kindling Hollywood’s interest in film and TV projects. But he had little success. Marvel was such a failure when it came to conquering other media that Batman cocreator Bob Kane took to teasing that “Batman was a big deal on television and in movies, and we at Marvel had done nothing,” Lee once recalled.

Until the late 1990s Kane was dead right. Marvel’s Hollywood dreams had remained largely unrealized. Science-fiction ace Harlan Ellison was working on a Black Widow TV series in the early 1980s. A Doctor Strange movie was in development in 1986, but after Eddie Murphy’s The Golden Child fizzled, the studio canceled it.

“The studio said, ‘Well, that had magic in it and it bombed, so magic must not sell,’” says Carl Potts, then the editor of Doctor Strange.

Of the projects that did make it to the screen, Marvel probably wished they hadn’t.

Howard the Duck, released in 1986, was Marvel’s first modern-day big-screen adaptation, and the title earned just $16 million domestically against a $36 million budget. It was such a spectacular loser that it supposedly led to a fistfight between two Universal executives over who was to blame.

The Punisher cast Swedish lunkhead Dolph Lundgren as the gun-toting vigilante for a 1989 dud that went straight to video.

Also skipping theaters was 1992’s Captain America. The bargain-basement thriller—sorry, “thriller”—from director Albert Pyun got hustled into production following the success of Batman, but he didn’t have the budget (a reported $7.5 million) or script to do the story justice.

Fantastic Four was the perhaps the biggest black eye of all. A German company had optioned the property in the mid-1980s, and it was put into production more or less because the option was set to expire in 1992, dashing Marvel’s hope of reacquiring the potentially valuable property in the wake of Batman’s success.

In the contract Marvel had failed to specify a minimum budget, so executive producer Bernd Eichinger went ahead with a rock-bottom level of reportedly just $1 million. The cast, which included Jay Underwood and Rebecca Staab, was paid a measly $3,500 a week, and the on-set catering consisted of little more than bologna sandwiches. The special effects budget was just as skimpy. Mr. Fantastic’s stretching was accomplished in one shot by attaching an empty glove to a pole and pulling.

The finished product was so embarrassing that Marvel bought the movie back so it would never be released. Bootleg copies have trickled out on VHS and DVD.

From its early days Marvel flirted with producing its own material. The company had launched a production studio in 1980 (it later became an animation entity) and founded a subsidiary called Marvel Films in 1993. However, its M.O., more often than not, was to license properties to others, leading to less control over the finished product—as well as a complicated tangle of rights.

“Marvel had licensed that stuff so much in the seventies and eighties that stuff was still hanging out there in pieces and parts all over the place,” says former Marvel president Terry Stewart. “We couldn’t get anything done because we couldn’t get back our rights. At the same time, we felt the characters couldn’t be done right with the technology available. We worried we’d have to spend a gazillion dollars for something that might fail and might not live up to standards. We didn’t want to put the characters in that position. That’s why we did the cartoons.”

The studio produced popular X-Men and Spider-Man animated series in the 1990s. But live-action success eluded them.

Beyond the special effects problem, one of the issues both Marvel and DC faced was that comic book movies for a long time weren’t particularly respected in Hollywood. The idea of comics as kids’ stuff was deeply entrenched.

“Studios were behind the curve in terms of the growing popularity of comics, and not just their growing popularity, but also the age of the comic-book reader,” DC’s former president Jenette Kahn said in 2012. “They found it impossible to believe that the average age of our reader was 28 years old. And if I told them it was 28, they would say, ‘Oh, well, he’s clearly a dope.’”

That outdated perception began to change when younger executives and producers began moving into positions of power in Hollywood. These were people who’d read The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen growing up and were hip to how cool and sophisticated comic books could be. They respected the medium and were eager to mine it for all its worth. Many directors were also comic fans, including Steven Spielberg, who used to hang around the DC offices when he was twelve.

No one had to explain to these people that comic books didn’t necessarily equal trash.

Comic books also garnered more respect when they consistently began to generate the thing Hollywood respected most: money.

Batman had been a global sensation, but like Superman before it, its increasingly terrible sequels offered diminishing returns. By the time the embarrassing Batman & Robin hit screens in 1997, the franchise deserved to be tossed in the bottom of the Batcave, reinforcing the alarming notion that even the most iconic comic book properties had a limited lifespan on film. Comic book movies couldn’t possibly become a Hollywood mainstay, could they?

The comic book adaptation that kicked off the modern-day obsession is a movie that many don’t even realize is from a comic book. Men in Black, the 1997 Will Smith–Tommy Lee Jones blockbuster, was adapted from an obscure black-and-white comic published in 1990 by indie press Aircel. Aircel was later acquired by Malibu, which was then bought by Marvel in 1994.

“Don’t ever forget that the movie that changed everything was a black-and-white pick-up,” artist Steve Bissette says. “That changed the paradigm away from all Marvel being able to get was a Hulk TV series and an awful Dr. Strange TV movie. Everything they’d been aching to do with movies for decades was suddenly possible, and it was possible because of something they had accidentally acquired.”

Malibu founder Scott Rosenberg began trying to sell Men in Black in the early 1990s. He encountered resistance.

“I touted it as a comic book, but the studios were thinking that there was a correlation between the success of a comic in print and box office,” says Rosenberg, now the head of Platinum Studios. “I was explaining that was not the case. I was turned down by every studio two to three times at least.”

The property eventually landed at Sony, and the movie’s success opened many people’s eyes to the rich opportunity comic books presented. Hollywood began delivering more properties based on funnybooks.

New Line Cinema’s Blade followed the next year. The vampire-hunter character played by Wesley Snipes was plucked from a relatively obscure Marvel magazine called Tomb of Dracula, and like Men in Black the year before, Blade did not seem like a typical superhero film. The main character didn’t sport a colorful costume, and many who bought tickets were probably ignorant of the Marvel connection.

The real game changer would come in 2000.

Marvel and its various partners had been trying to adapt its most successful print property, the X-Men, into film for nearly two decades. Comic writer Chris Claremont had written an outline in 1982, and Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas had taken a crack at a screenplay in 1984 for Orion Pictures. Like so many proposed adaptations before them, they simply sat in a drawer.

“The closest we came was the meeting with James Cameron [in the late 1980s],” Claremont says. “Stan [Lee] and I went out to meet with him. We’d been through Superman and Tim Burton’s Batman. This was Marvel’s way to get on the bandwagon and do it in a uniquely Marvel style, which was to find a visual storyteller who was the cinematic equivalent of [comic artists] Dave Cockrum, John Byrne, and Paul Smith on the X-Men.”

During the meeting Lee and Cameron, a big comic book fan, got sidetracked talking about another Marvel property—Spider-Man—and it quickly became clear that X-Men wasn’t Cameron’s priority anymore.

Marvel explored deals with other partners, including Columbia, before ultimately optioning the rights to 20th Century Fox in 1993.

“From Marvel’s perspective, the only films they’d done were The Punisher and Blade,” Chris Claremont says. “They weren’t awful, they weren’t great. They were just B-List. That was the expectation Fox had for X-Men. But from Marvel’s perspective, it was, ‘Wow, 20th Century Fox, a real studio, wants to make a movie! Cool!’”

The conventional wisdom since has been that Marvel made a terrible deal for the property—a mistake that was only magnified over the years as the X-Men under Fox went on to unimaginable financial success. But the price—$1.5 million and 5 percent of the gross receipts per movie, according to a copy of the deal dated July 1993—was reasonable. At the time comic book properties were commanding around $100,000 to $200,000.

The problem for Marvel came with the contract’s language. Rights contracts are usually written with ridiculous specificity to try to define exactly what the buyer is getting. The language in this particular contract, according to sources, was too broad and ended up transferring a larger-than-expected swath of Marvel’s intellectual property to Fox. In short, instead of a limited number of X-Men, the movie studio ended up landing the rights to all things mutant in the Marvel universe in perpetuity. That windfall includes not just the X-Men we all recognize, such as Professor X and Wolverine, but also dozens of other characters from Marvel’s numerous X titles.

A character such as the time-traveling Cable—not technically an X-Men but related to the universe—wasn’t part of that original deal, but the contract basically granted Fox rights if Cable was mentioned in another film. (He’s set to appear in Fox’s Deadpool 2.)

“They were good deals at the time, in that they got us into the movie business. We didn’t have the money or the expertise to do it,” says Marvel’s former publisher Shirrel Rhoades. “Now, they’re bad deals because Marvel is doing so well with The Avengers and the other stuff. The people running Marvel wish those deals had never been made, but back then it got our foot in the door.”

X-Men was hardly a sure thing in the 1990s. The comic book sold millions of copies a year, but it was far from a household name. When, in 1996, director Bryan Singer was hired to direct it, trade bible Variety botched the movie’s title in a headline, running a banner that read, “Singer to Direct Fox’s ‘Men.’”

Singer had the page framed and hung it on his office wall—a humorous reminder of a time when comic book movies got no respect.

The script went through several permutations, and originally the studio was thinking of X-Men as just another superhero story. Luckily Fox sought counsel with Marvel over its various drafts. Claremont, then Marvel’s editorial director, offered one particularly important critique.

The question was, What made the X-Men different? The thing that separated them from other superheroes was that they were outsiders, shunned by society for being different. That was the crux of what made them interesting, and that aspect was made central in the final script. The movie wasn’t about costumed do-gooders saving the world. Instead, the X-Men and the persecution they suffered for being mutants was an allegory for the mistreatment of every marginalized group in society. If you were gay, a minority—even a comic book reader who’d been made fun of—you saw yourself in the X-Men.

The director wisely made the decision to dispense with any hint of camp and treat the movie as deadly serious. One of the concessions to this dark worldview was to dispense with the group’s colorful spandex costumes and instead outfit the team in black leather tactical get-ups. The move disappointed some diehards.

“I remember when the first photos of the X-Men suits came into the office,” says Ruben Diaz, a former Marvel editor. “We all looked at them and said, ‘These aren’t the X-Men’s suits.’ It was identifiable as the X-Men, but they weren’t being true to canon with the costuming.”

Heretical or not, in the end X-Men cleaned up. The cast (which included a ripped Hugh Jackman as Wolverine and Patrick Stewart as Professor X) and the story really connected with audiences around the world. The movie rang up a massive $54 million opening weekend that shocked the industry, including Fox Studio, which had been estimating something closer to $35 million. Variety characterized the numbers for an adaptation of a lesser-known property with no marquee stars as “x-plosive” and “stupefying.”

Fox immediately started planning sequels, and the movie’s runaway success also helped jumpstart other films based on Marvel characters, including Daredevil at Fox and a long-gestating Hulk movie at Universal.

But it was to be a movie based on another Marvel character that would become the genre’s biggest hit to date: 2002’s Spider-Man. The fact that the movie ever saw the light of day remains a minor miracle. The movie had been caught in a tangled web of legal red tape for years and was subject to so many rumors, changes of ownership, and stops and starts that it grew to almost mythological proportions.

Spidey was optioned in 1985 for a reported $225,000 by the Cannon Group, a B-movie company run by two Israeli cousins. Cannon was best known for churning out forgettable action movies in the 1980s, including American Ninja and Sylvester Stallone’s Cobra. The company tried for several years to get the movie up and running, but it lacked a clear understanding of the character. Early treatments hewed closer to schlocky monster movies than the story of adolescent angst that Spider-Man required. A parade of script rewrites and attached directors followed.

“The Spider-Man movie has been the longest on-going disaster you have ever heard of,” Stan Lee said at a 1989 sales conference. “Cannon has had 10 scripts done already, each one worse than the one before.… Every year you’ll read in the trades, ‘Coming soon Spider-Man, don’t miss it.’ Miss it, please, until we get a good script.”

Cannon soon went into bankruptcy and another studio acquired Spider-Man setting off years of lawsuits among the players who had bought into the original production. Untangling the mess dragged on for years. Ultimately the delay might have been a good thing.

“I worked on every Spider-Man movie except the ones that got made,” says former Marvel editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco. “I think people bought the rights because they thought there might be something there, but then the technology wasn’t there yet for the special effects. So ultimately they ended up watering it down to the point where it wouldn’t have been the big-scale film we think of. One of the Spider-Man treatments I worked on, we could have done for $2 or $3 million dollars. It would have essentially been a crime movie. Besides the web-swinging, it was not a big special effects film. It was more the human drama.”

The rights were finally sorted in the late 1990s, and Spider-Man ended up at Columbia. The movie was fast-tracked for production with Sam Raimi at the helm and Tobey Maguire as the hero. Raimi not only conquered the technological challenges—he convincingly showed Spider-Man swinging through the canyons of New York—but also presented a story that captured the lovable awkwardness of Peter Parker and his quixotic pursuit of girl-next-door Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst).

Spider-Man opened in May 2002 and smashed box office records, raking in an unbelievable $115 million domestically. The number obliterated the all-time box office record by 26 percent.

“Invent a new word, because it’s better than great,” an executive from research firm ACNielsen gushed in 2002. “It’s so big, the mind has trouble comprehending how great a record they’ve set.”

Marvel’s success was in contrast to DC, which arguably hadn’t had a universally acclaimed hit since 1989’s Batman. Instead, the company gave audiences 1997’s Steel, starring basketball lug nut Shaquille O’Neal in a suit of armor.

DC still strongly believed in its characters’ abilities to translate into other media. As early as the 1980s DC’s president Jenette Kahn began spending less of her time on the day-to-day operations of comic book publishing and more out in Los Angeles trying to broker television and film deals.

“I remember editorial meetings where Jenette had returned from LA and told us that Warner Bros considered DC ‘a garden of characters.’ We were excited by that,” says former editor Michael Eury. “By that point it was clear that these characters were ripe for multimedia exploitation.”

The time was so ripe that after DC’s parent company, Warner Communications, announced a merger with media giant Time Inc. in 1989, DC was placed under the control of Warner Bros.’ movie division, not its publishing.

Several hits and misses followed in the decade. (The Wachowskis, the siblings behind The Matrix, worked on a treatment for Plastic Man in the mid-1990s, but it went nowhere.) It quickly became clear that DC was going to have to get more aggressive if it hoped to counter Marvel’s success with X-Men and Spider-Man.

“It wasn’t until Marvel started making superhero movies that Warner Bros, our chief engine for turning DC properties into movies, began to think, ‘Wait, maybe there is a treasure trove at DC, and maybe it’s not just Superman and Batman,’” Kahn said in 2012.

Warner Bros. worried that without successful movies featuring its characters, it was set to lose a whole generation of fans—fans who would be indoctrinated into Marvel’s world instead.

“We’re not going to let that happen,” Warner Bros. exec Kevin Tsujihara said in 2003, insisting that the studio was set to begin hiring writers to exploit DC properties.

While Marvel remained a relatively nimble company, with Perlmutter and Arad in charge, DC remained part of a plodding corporate behemoth, and the bureaucracy made it difficult to get movies made.

What followed Warner Bros.’ newfound early-aughts commitment to DC characters was—with one exception—a string of misguided films that didn’t make much of a dent in the box office. In 2004 Halle Berry played a woman who gains superpowers after being resurrected by a cat. Critics roundly trashed Catwoman, and the only positive to come out of it was the opportunity for entertaining cat-pun takedowns in newspaper headlines. “Far from Purrr-fect,” read one. “Should Be Fixed,” read another. Constantine, a Vertigo comic about a chain-smoking British mage, opened with a woefully miscast Keanu Reeves in 2005. V for Vendetta, released in 2006, didn’t make a particularly strong case for watching the movie versus reading the original Alan Moore and David Lloyd series.

Warner’s one true home run came with its latest interpretation of Batman. After the critical drubbing the previous two films took, 1995’s Batman Forever and 1997’s Batman & Robin, the studio was determined to move in a new direction. No more Batnipples, no more awful Arnold Schwarzenegger “cold” jokes. The new take would aim to reposition the Batman franchise and move it away from the camp that had crept in, in the same way that Tim Burton’s 1989 film had obliterated the memory of the goofy 1966 TV series.

The studio needed a director capable of treating the material in a respectful fashion that would get viewers of all ages excited about Batman again.

Brit Christopher Nolan had made a name for himself with the trippy Memento and the noir drama Insomnia. When he heard that Warner Bros. was in search of a new direction for Batman, Nolan walked into studio president Alan Horn’s office and said, “‘Look, this is what I want to do in the movie.”

In just fifteen minutes the director laid out a detailed vision that included everything from what the Batmobile would look like to the body armor that the hero would wear. Horn basically committed to Nolan right there in the room.

Richard Donner’s Superman inspired Nolan the most. As with that movie, Nolan wanted to tell a unique origin story.

“What I wanted to do was to tell the Batman story I’d never seen, the one that the fans have been wanting to see—the story of how Bruce Wayne becomes Batman,” Nolan has said. “There were also a lot of very interesting gaps in the mythology that we were able to interpret ourselves and bring in our own ideas of how Bruce Wayne and Batman evolved specifically.”

Batman Begins starred Christian Bale in the titular role and provided an in-depth look at how young Bruce trains and develops his superhero persona. Along the way he battles the Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) and former mentor, Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson).

Before the film’s release in June 2005 the studio’s marketing department set out to impress upon potential ticket buyers that this new chapter had no connection to the Joel Schumacher movies from a few years before and that it represented a different, cooler new take on Batman.

Batman Begins was screened for DC employees, and president Paul Levitz provided an introduction.

“He said this is one of the movies where they got it right. ‘You can be proud of this movie,’” says former DC editor Tom Palmer Jr. “That kind of made everyone feel good to see that there are people out there that get it.”

The film opened to respectable, if not record-breaking, returns. It pulled in some $49 million in its opening weekend. Its most significant contribution may not have been to Warner’s bottom line, however. What Batman Begins did do was successfully establish a new tone for DC’s movies.

Nolan’s world was not the optimistic, colorful world of Richard Donner’s Superman. It was a dark, violent, and monochrome place filled with corrupt cops and heroes who spoke with a guttural growl—much of it borrowed from Frank Miller’s 1987 “Year One” story arc.

The “grim and gritty” tone that had permeated comic books since the 1980s had taken hold in the movies, and it soon became the prevailing aesthetic. Woe unto those who gave audiences something different. When Superman Returns opened the next summer, audiences and critics generally rejected it for too closely aping Richard Donner’s Superman films. The reboot was directed by Bryan Singer, who’d quit the X-Men franchise after a dispute over money to defect to DC. Superman Returns opened just a month after X-Men: The Last Stand, and Marvel partisans were happy to gloat that the mutant film opened to double what Superman did.

About the only victory Superman Returns did score over the competition was when ads for it appeared in Marvel comics, a rare breach of protocol that angered some Marvel zombies. Stan Lee had caught a similar kind of flak back in 1966 when Marvel comics carried an ad for CBS’s Saturday morning cartoon lineup that included Superman. He was forced to pen an explanation that ran in Marvel’s books.

By 2008 Nolan was back. And the darkness with him. The Dark Knight presented a crime-ridden world where a violent, almost fascist hero in heavy body armor lays down the law. It was a sophisticated take on the genre, and to many it represented the height of the increasingly popular superhero genre. The film was anchored by a head-turning performance from Heath Ledger as the psychotic Joker—a role that earned him a Best Supporting Oscar, making him the first actor to ever win for a superhero film.

Around the time that DC was reinventing its superhero world with Batman Begins, Marvel was set to take bold steps of its own to gain more control of its properties and change the superhero game forever.

Since the founding of Marvel Studios, the company’s Hollywood arm, in 1993, Marvel had been mostly in the business of licensing its characters to other studios, content to sit back and collect a chunk of the merchandising money that often flowed in as a result of a theatrical film. The returns from the films themselves were certainly modest. Marvel reportedly took in a piddly $25,000 from Blade and earned just $62 million for the first two Spider-Man movies.

In 2003 David Maisel had an idea. Maisel was a Harvard-educated Hollywood insider who’d worked with former Disney head Michael Ovitz and superagent Ari Emanuel, the basis for Jeremy Piven’s pushy character on Entourage. Maisel reached out to Marvel with a promise to improve their bottom line, and he was given a meeting with Ike Perlmutter, who, along with Avi Arad, was in control of Marvel at the time.

Maisel’s pitch was simple: What if Marvel Studios owned and produced its own movies, making and releasing them in a time and manner of its own choosing? And the kicker would be that all the movies would take place in the same cinematic universe, with each subsequent film building on the previous—sort of like George Lucas had done with Star Wars. It would be the cinematic equivalent of the tightly woven Marvel print universe, where the mantra was, “If you see thunder clouds in one comic book, it would be raining in the next.”

The thrifty Perlmutter and Marvel’s conservative board were skeptical, but in early 2005 they gave the plan a green light. The company soon arranged a financing deal with Merrill Lynch that offered $525 million to make ten films over the next eight years featuring, basically, the characters Marvel hadn’t already licensed to others. Even to longtime comic book fans, the list was somewhat underwhelming. Who’s Shang-Chi again? And who cares about Hawkeye, a guy whose power is something kids learn at summer camp? And Nick Fury? Hadn’t they tried that already, and the result was a terrible 1998 David Hasselhoff TV movie?

Disappointing or not, the deal allowed Marvel to chart its own course and with little risk for the company. The only thing it put up for collateral was the rights to these supposedly B-list characters.

Luckily for Marvel, the repo man never came for their heroes. Marvel’s first self-produced movie, Iron Man, outperformed even the most optimistic predictions and launched the studio on a nearly unbroken string of successes that continues to this day.

Marvel had reacquired the rights to the armored character from New Line in 2005 and made it the debut film in part because head of the studio Avi Arad loved the character when he was growing up. Hopes were not high for a character who few outside of the comic book industry knew. Those hopes got even lower after Robert Downey Jr., an actor best known at the time for his stint in rehab, was picked to star.

“Don’t worry. We’ll be very happy if this breaks even and we can sell more toys,” a Marvel board member told David Maisel.

But fewer decisions in Hollywood have been smarter. Downey, along with director Jon Favreau, brought a lightness to the film about a cocky munitions titan who builds his own personal hi-tech suit of armor.

The amusing tone immediately set Iron Man apart from other superhero films, especially those from its rival.

“Marvel figured out that we’d rather hang out with flawed characters who were nonetheless spiritually uplifting heroes rather than the dark, self-loathing, and haunted DC characters,” says Jeff Most, a Hollywood producer whose credits include the comic book adaptation The Crow. “That DC pathos intrigues us to a point, but wallowing in darkness is never as satisfying as a good laugh in a popcorn flick with a lighter tone.”

Robert Downey Jr. was also firmly in the Marvel camp. He had a few choice words for The Dark Knight, which happened to be going head to head with his Iron Man in the summer of 2008. Downey slagged off the competitor for its pretentious, operatic tone.

“That’s not my idea of what I want to see in a movie,” Downey said. “This is so high-brow and so fucking smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie. You know what? Fuck DC Comics. That’s all I have to say, and that’s where I’m really coming from.”

Iron Man, with its unique mix of thrilling action, engaging characters, and winking humor, finally fulfilled the dream that Stan Lee had been chasing for some thirty years; it was able to capture that special formula that made Marvel comics great, and it stayed faithful to what had already been established in print. Iron Man looked and acted like he did in the comics. His origin was the same. His supporting cast was kept intact. (One concession: Stark’s human butler, Jarvis, was turned into a disembodied computer over fears he was too close to Batman’s Alfred.) It was a far cry from Marvel’s previous licensed efforts, which often ignored the source material. The Punisher had jettisoned nearly everything recognizable about the character, including the costume, and turned him into a generic action hero. The 1992 Captain America turned Nazi villain Red Skull into an Italian, for some reason.

From Iron Man forward, every Marvel movie has attempted to capture the essence of the character and to remain true to its print origins. Marvel trusted its comics. The studio brought in editors and writers from the various comics to consult on the scripts, smartly figuring that those who are in the trenches with the characters every day know them best. Marvel publishing has functioned like an R&D lab for more than fifty years, testing ideas and honing concepts, and it would be foolish to ignore that information.

Captain America: The First Avenger nailed the hero’s Boy Scout charm and wisely set the story during World War II, over the objections of some at Marvel who thought a period movie would alienate young viewers. The company even managed to find a take on thee-and-thou-spouting Thor that didn’t have audiences laughing it out of the theater.

For better or worse—and judging by the box office returns, it’s for better—Marvel Studios is like a factory, stamping out movies like GM churns out cars. Each is built to similar specifications, and audiences know what they will be getting.

It’s a top-down approach, similar to the way rival DC produced comics back in the 1960s, and it can be limiting for filmmakers. Directors are brought in to execute Marvel’s vision, not their own. The look and feel of Marvel movies can vary only so much, and each has to fit comfortably within the universe the company has established.

As with its comics line back in the early days, the result is that the Marvel brand itself has become a powerful draw. If you liked the previous Marvel offering, you’ll probably like the next. Simply the fact that a movie is being released by Marvel is now enough to guarantee ticket sales.

“Stan once told me [in the 1970s] was what he had in mind for Marvel was what he called an ‘advertising agency,’” says former Marvel writer and editor Denny O’Neil. “If he had a chance to rewrite that, he might have called it ‘synergy,’ where everything supports everything else. So you don’t go to see a superhero movie; you go to see a Marvel movie. It’s not the same with DC. With DC, you go see a Batman movie, not a DC movie. With Marvel, you go see a Marvel movie.”

DC, however, is not strictly beholden to a single interpretation of its characters and allows far more variety. As a result, a character such as Batman can simultaneously exist in different iterations across various media. He’s the harmless caped crusader on Saturday morning cartoons, the sarcastic wisecracker in The LEGO Batman Movie, and the violent avenger from Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.

“It isn’t just about a single approach to everything,” Diane Nelson, president of DC Entertainment, said in 2014. “It’s the right character matched with the right talent in the right medium.”

The downside to the approach is that DC’s brand is not as strong or cohesive as Marvel’s. If you went to see, say, Catwoman and loved it (assuming there was something very wrong with you), you really had nowhere to go from there. All you could do was wait for the next DC superhero movie and hope that the director and tone established was to your particular liking.

The scattershot approach was great when the character and a filmmaker’s particular vision meshed and you got something like Batman Begins. When it didn’t, you got misfires such as the 2011’s Green Lantern, which someone at Warner Bros. thought would be best served as a silly action yarn.

Marvel has also been much more disciplined with its planning than DC. On the heels of Iron Man’s success the studio confidently announced that four more movies were in the works—each with a release date as far as three years out. (That schedule has since been revised multiple times to run through 2019.)

“I think Marvel has led the way there,” says Hugh Jackman, who played Wolverine. “The more you plan, the more payoff there is.”

Payoff is right. Partly driven by the success of its movie slate, Marvel announced in August 2009 that it was being acquired by Disney for an astounding $4 billion dollars. For comparison’s sake, the company was valued at $400 million as recently as 2003. At the time some in the financial world thought Disney was crazy for spending so much on a company whose top properties, such as the X-Men, were in the hands of others. Disney’s stock fell when news of the purchase hit.

But Disney—and Marvel—believed in the prospects for the huge number of characters Marvel still had left. A group of interns was tasked with going through Marvel comics and counting them. They came up with more than eight thousand.

Regardless of whether any of those characters are as good as Spider-Man, the Marvel purchase put the marketing and merchandising might of Disney behind the company and ended its dependence on other studios to distribute its films. A good thing was about to get better.

The sale caught Warner Bros. and DC off guard and forced the entertainment giant to think about ways to catch up to Marvel. DC had been thinking about a reorganization to coincide with the company’s seventy-fifth anniversary in 2010, but the Disney sale forced it to accelerate its plans.

One month after the Marvel-Disney announcement Warner Bros. dropped some fairly significant news of its own. It announced that Warner Bros. was tightening its control over DC Comics, moving the publishing company into a new division called DC Entertainment, which had been created “to maximize the potential of the DC brand.” With the restructuring, DC Comics was eventually moved from New York after three-quarters of a century to new digs in Burbank, California, forcing staffers to make the difficult decision about whether to uproot themselves and their families and go west.

“It would have been disingenuous for us to suggest that we had not been thinking about [the Marvel sale],” Warner chairman and CEO Barry Meyer said in 2009. “[The announcement] reconfirmed in us our strong belief in how valuable DC really is.”

Translation: We’ve got hundreds of characters sitting there that we better start exploiting, because we’re getting left behind.

Fans and industry watchers worried that DC’s latest reorganization didn’t exactly appear to lead to a coordinated effort when it came to its film slate. It looked to all the world that the company’s strategy amounted to frantically chasing Marvel without a well-reasoned plan in place.

“Here’s the problem: Marvel’s slate of movies is by and large a very carefully coordinated endeavor,” says writer Peter David. “Everything interconnects to everything else. I am not remotely convinced that DC is putting any kind of that detailed thought into the movies they’re doing. It’s possible that they are, but I wouldn’t necessarily bet the farm on it.”

Part of the reason Marvel Studios has remained so disciplined is that it has someone overseeing it all, president of production Kevin Feige. He’s less of a stuffy executive than a geek in a suit. Feige is a Star Wars and comic book nut who owns an action-figure collection so large that he’s forced to house it in a shed he built in his backyard. He worked on X-Men in 2000 before being hired by Marvel. In 2007 he was named the studio’s head at just thirty-three years old. He quickly began managing the studio’s plans and building Marvel’s cinematic world.

By contrast, DC had no single guiding voice; various executives throughout Warner Bros. managed its superhero films. DC was also stuck without a defining gestalt for its superhero universe after Christopher Nolan concluded his stand-alone Batman trilogy and moved on to nonsuperhero projects. Marvel had established its world, some of its characters, and the tone of its films from its very first entry, Iron Man, but DC still did not have a movie that would serve as the foundation for every project moving forward.

That would change with 2013’s Man of Steel, the Superman reboot from director Zack Snyder that polarized audiences and critics alike. Some found the dark, broody, monochrome take on the classic hero refreshing. Others wanted no part of Snyder’s repellant and violent vision and took to nicknaming his world the DC “murderverse.”

In spite of the lukewarm reception, Warner Bros. opted to forge ahead with Snyder’s vision (probably because they had no time to find a new one and another reboot would be embarrassing). In October 2014 the studio announced an ambitious slate of superhero flicks, all the way through 2020, flowing out of the cinematic world established in Man of Steel. Snyder was now the de facto creative head of the DC universe. Audiences would get movies starring the Flash, Aquaman, and Wonder Woman, among others.

The announcement looked like a desperate attempt to copy Marvel’s success—but with one glaring difference: instead of introducing the heroes one by one in their own solo movies, as Marvel had done, the studio decided to rush out a pairing between Batman and Superman for its very next movie and follow it up with a gigantic team-up of all its major heroes in Justice League—both directed by Snyder. It basically appeared that DC was hastily backing into a cinematic universe.

“People make an assumption that we’re going to mirror Marvel’s strategy, for example with Avengers,” DC Entertainment president Diane Nelson said in 2010. “We do have a very different attitude about how you build a content slate. And it isn’t necessarily about connecting those properties together to build into a single thing. We think we’ve got great stories and characters that will lend themselves to great stand-alone experiences, and that’s the way we’re focusing on it.”

Not everyone was buying it.

“The cinematic universe is a perfect example of the rivalry, where they say, ‘We’ve got to do the same thing, but we can’t look like we’re doing the same thing, because it will look like we’re copying,’” says industry analyst Milton Griepp. “DC couldn’t start with a minor character and expand it out, like Marvel did with Iron Man, so they start with their two biggest characters because they want to build a cinematic universe, but they’re going to do it differently than Marvel.”

To Marvel, however, its success was responsible for DC’s plan.

“I don’t think they’d be doing it if we hadn’t succeeded, so I like the acknowledgement that we’ve succeeded,” Kevin Feige says of DC’s slate. “That’s always nice.”

DC, on paper at least, remained confident. In one particular case of propaganda DC responded to a seventh grader who’d written a letter asking how DC planned to compete against Marvel when “Marvel seemingly dominates.”

DC’s December 2013 reply claimed Marvel was ahead because it had the freedom to work with numerous distributors and DC was stuck with one: Warner Bros. “We don’t like to toot our own horn (well actually we do),” the letter concluded, “our movies by far exceed all of Marvels in sales.”

“I feel like Batman and Superman are transcendent of superhero movies in a way, because they’re Batman and Superman. They’re not just, like, the flavor of the week Ant-Man—not to be mean, but whatever it is.”

—Batman v Superman director Zack Snyder in 2015

“Do I want to fire some shots at DC right now, at Zack Snyder? I read some of those comments … and I was like, ‘Oh thanks, Zack. That’s great. Way to do something original.’ But I would say we’re still making something very original in our own way.… [We’re] not trying to mimic a better Christopher Nolan movie or something like that.”

—Captain America: Civil War star Sebastian Stan in 2015

It was a weirdly defensive boast, especially in response to a neg from a preteen named Spencer, but DC was free to believe what it believed. Its next movie would test that claim of superiority in a way that none of its releases had before.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was originally intended to be a straight Man of Steel sequel, but following the lukewarm reception for the first one, the subsequent film was basically changed into a new Batman movie with Superman costarring. Following delays, the studio announced the movie would hit theaters May 6, 2016.

The date put DC’s movie on a collision course with Marvel, which had claimed that opening weekend way back in June 2013 for a then-unnamed film. The situation got even rockier for Warner Bros. when Marvel revealed that the untitled movie would in fact be Captain America: Civil War, the anticipated follow-up to the well-liked second movie, The Winter Soldier. The DC-Marvel game of chicken sent fans into a tizzy.

For months neither side backed down.

“We had the flag there first,” Marvel’s Feige told Empire at the time. “What other people do and where has always been less of our concern. It’s about keeping our head down and doing what we would believe would be cool for an audience to see.”

DC admitted that when they had squatted on the release date, they were gambling that Marvel would not have its movie ready for release. When it was clear that Marvel was moving ahead with the third Captain America, Warner Bros. caved, shifting Batman v Superman up a few weeks to March 25, 2016.

“Maybe our reconnaissance wasn’t great,” admitted Warner Bros.’ president of domestic distribution Dan Fellman in 2014.

Score yet another one for Marvel.

But for Warner Bros. all the delays and shifts and adjustments would be worth it because—in the words of Warner CEO Kevin Tsujihara—it was crucial that Batman v Superman got “the foundation right on DC.” Man of Steel had been a bit of a bust, causing the studio to rejigger its universe plans, and if the sequel also underperformed, what then? Warner Bros. and DC would be left with a long slate of promised movies stretching years into the future and no viable creative direction in which to take them. If you can’t even get Batman right, how in the hell do you tackle Aquaman?

Unfortunately for Warner Bros., Batman v Superman didn’t come close to living up to expectations. It used Nolan’s template from the previous three Batman movies as a starting point, then bolted on all of Zack Snyder’s polarizing trademarks, including gratuitous slo-mo and more gratuitous slo-mo. The tone was humorless and coal-black, the story nonsensical, and the big showdown between the two heroes a bore. This was a movie that used Lex Luthor’s urine, known affectionately as “Granny’s peach tea,” as some sort of plot point. A movie with a plan from its villain so complicated that it immediately crumbles under the barest scrutiny. A movie in which Batman and Superman stop trying to kill each other because they discover their mothers have the same name.

The beating it took in the press was far worse than either one of its titular heroes suffered in the movie itself. “A stink bucket of disappointment,” Vox wrote. “It’s about as diverting as having a porcelain sink broken over your head,” the New York Times sniped. The flick earned a hefty eight 2016 Razzie nominations, the annual awards celebrating the most putrid in film.

Not helping the film’s case was all the hype over its showdown with Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War. Even though Warner Bros. had backed down on releasing it the same day, the movies couldn’t help but be tied together. Nearly every article and review compared the two, which didn’t do Warner any favors. The audience found itself being forced to weigh Marvel and DC’s outputs and probably concluding it preferred Marvel’s.

Civil War told a ripped-from-the-headlines tale of superheroes lining up on opposite sides after disagreeing on a government regulation policing their actions. It asked questions about the limits of heroism and the power of government. The hint of political resonance wasn’t particularly overt or deep, but in comparison to Batman v Superman, it made Civil War look like Chaplin’s The Great Dictator.

Having its heroes violently opposing one another was a risky direction for Marvel to take, and as with so many other great moments in this long rivalry, Marvel’s decision was due in part to DC. After Warner Bros. announced Batman v Superman, Civil War directors Joe and Anthony Russo became determined to do something beyond just another superhero adventure. They began lobbying Kevin Feige to do something different with the third Cap movie.

“After they announced Batman v Superman, [Feige] said, ‘You guys are absolutely right,’” Joe Russo said in 2016. “We needed to do something challenging with the material or we were going to start to lose the audience.”

Losing the audience was a real danger, and the main cause was likely to be boredom. By the time X-Men: Apocalypse (from Fox) limped into theaters in May 2016, audiences had been under almost continuous assault by superhero movies for more than a decade, with one arriving nearly every two months. Fatigue became a threat, and any movie that looked like just another spandex origin story ran the risk of being ignored by audiences, convinced they’d been there, done that already. (To wit: The Amazing Spider-Man 2.)

Fox’s Deadpool, released in February 2016, was the perfect antidote for tired superhero flicks. The story about a sarcastic, sword-wielding assassin capitalized on the ubiquity of comic book movies, taking advantage of the viewers’ familiarity with the tropes to perfectly send up the genre. It was nearly impossible to sit through another self-serious superhero film after watching Deadpool cackle as he ran over a bad guy with a Zamboni.

DC felt the wind shift, but by the time of its next release, it was too late. Suicide Squad, an edgy team-up of Batman villains Harley Quinn, Killer Croc, Deadshot, and others, was set to arrive some four months after Batman v Superman. Warner Bros. executives were reportedly spooked at the drubbing the previous film took and began desperately scrambling to lighten the tone of Suicide Squad in hopes that it wouldn’t land with the same kind of thud as Batman v Superman.

The film was in disarray in part because of the tight timetable. Writer-director David Ayer, the man behind the 2014 Brad Pitt tank drama Fury, finished the Suicide Squad script in just six weeks. A release date had to be met, and promotional deals had to be honored. Once again it felt that, unlike Marvel, DC lacked firm control over its product.

“Feige’s success boils down to getting the tone right at the script development stage,” says producer Most. “The development factory nurtures its scripts and doesn’t back into distribution dates before a script is ready to go into production. A common refrain from the filmmakers working on DC films has been they’ve had to adhere to a distribution date circled on a calendar and back into such, even when the script may not be fully ready to go.”

Suicide Squad turned out to be Warner’s second critical disaster of the year (though it did respectably at the box office). Critics and bloggers absolutely hated what they saw, their rage magnified by the frustration of being served yet another DC lemon. No story, no character development, an equally dark tone as Batman v Superman. The pile-on in the days leading up to the movie was absolutely brutal.

“Suicide Squad is bad,” Vanity Fair wrote. “Not fun bad. Not redeemable bad. Not the kind of bad that is the unfortunate result of artists honorably striving for something ambitious and falling short. Suicide Squad is just bad.”

Superhero fans, who had pegged the film as the one that might finally right the fast-sinking DC ship, were dispirited. Discouraged DC partisans lashed out at review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, creating a petition to shut down the site over its harsh reviews and spreading a ridiculous rumor on social media accusing Disney of paying off critics to trash non-Marvel movies.

Ayer initially defended Suicide Squad, saying on Twitter, “I love the movie and believe in it.” A few months later in January 2017 he tweeted a more revealing postmortem on the movie, admitting the movie had “flaws.” He said that he wished he had a time machine so he could go back and make the Joker (in a cameo appearance by Jared Leto) the main villain and “engineer a more grounded story.”

Too little too late. The backlash from the failure of Suicide Squad was becoming harder to ignore. In September 2016 a former Warner Bros. employee calling herself “Gracie Law” wrote a widely read open letter to Kevin Tsujihara, blasting the CEO for mishandling the DC universe. The anonymous employee called Suicide Squad a “trainwreck” and a “disservice to the characters.” The letter questioned how Zack Snyder, the man behind two stillborn superhero movies, was still not being punished for his failures, while rank-and-file employees were being laid off.

The studio soon took action, making its umpteenth attempt to finally get the DC cinematic universe on the right footing. The studio quietly demoted Zack Snyder’s upcoming Justice League epic, originally announced as two movies, to one and tried to move away from the depressing “murderverse” vibe by tweaking the script.

In September 2016 Warner promoted Geoff Johns, DC’s chief creative officer and former assistant to Richard Donner, to a more powerful role overseeing DC’s film output. Johns, a prolific writer, had been responsible for many of DC’s more popular comic book story lines during the past few years, including ones that sparked a resurgence in the popularity of Green Lantern and Aquaman. Warner paired Johns with production executive Jon Berg, making the duo the first full-time team overseeing DC’s movies. DC, like Marvel, finally had its guiding voice.

“Mistakenly in the past I think the studio has said, ‘Oh, DC films are gritty and dark and that’s what makes them different.’ That couldn’t be more wrong,” Johns told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s a hopeful and optimistic view of life. Even Batman has a glimmer of that in him. If he didn’t think he’d make tomorrow better, he’d stop.”

It remains to be seen whether DC’s changes will save its superhero universe from a slow, sad descent into irrelevance. (One good sign: the movie script for one of Johns’s signature characters, the Flash, was ordered completely rewritten in early 2017.) In the meantime Marvel marches on, continuing its historic run. It may be that there’s room enough for both companies to succeed.

“I may be naive, but I think there’s some data to suggest they don’t compete with each other,” says Simon Kinberg, producer of Deadpool and X-Men: Days of Futures Past. “I think that they build off each other. I think the reason they’re the biggest genre right now is because they’ve been good. The interest continues to grow and building beyond the comic book base into the mainstream audience. As long as they make good ones, it’ll be beneficial.”

For DC, making good films has been problematic—and may remain so without a more drastic course correction than the many they’ve made over the last few years. But one area where the company’s heroes have flourished is on television.

Beginning in 2012 with the CW’s Arrow, DC has built a cozy little broadcast universe that has grown in recent years to include The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, and Supergirl, among others.

DC has enjoyed modest success in the past on television, with the 1990s hit Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman and a syndicated Superboy, but now its properties have never been more in demand on the small screen.

The reasons are simple. The characters have built-in name recognition—an asset that’s becoming increasingly important in Hollywood where, on that basis alone, someone green-lit The A-Team movie.

Technology has also caught up. In years past it would have been impossible to offer cinema-level effects on a TV budget. Smallville, the long-running series about a young Superman, famously instituted a “no tights, no flights” rule and instead chose to tell more grounded stories about its hero. Now, however, most effects are within reach. The Flash, for example, accomplishes many shots of its lightning-quick hero by seamlessly inserting a computer-generated double.

Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow are all interwoven and act like a mini-DC cinematic universe. The shows have a similar tone—fun, light, and reliant on shocking cliffhangers. The characters all exist in the same world and occasionally cross over with one another.

But as with DC’s overall strategy, they have nothing to do with the movies. The Flash who appears on the CW every week is not the one who first showed up on the big screen in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. And the world portrayed in Fox’s Gotham each week also has no connection to the movie. The DC tent is large enough to accommodate multiple interpretations, and it may be better off for it. Audience members who are turned off by Snyder’s cinematic murderverse can simply switch on the TV for versions of the characters they might like more.

The approach provides more flexibility to tell different kinds of stories. It also makes it easier to switch up something that isn’t working.

Meanwhile Marvel has taken the exact opposite approach, opting to set all its TV and film projects (except the licensed ones) within the same universe. The company is hoping that if you enjoyed The Avengers, then you’ll tune in to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the ABC series starring Clark Gregg, the actor who also plays Agent Phil Coulson in the movies.

The show got off to a decent start when it debuted in 2013, fueled by a halo effect from the blockbuster films. The pilot drew some 12.1 million viewers. But by the second episode ratings fell some 30 percent and continued to decline.

The disinterest exposed the problems with Marvel’s single-universe strategy. By tying Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. into its films, the TV show just felt small by comparison. (And the production budgets on the first season didn’t help.) When Coulson references events from The Avengers or Samuel L. Jackson shows up in a brief cameo, as he’s done in two episodes, viewers are probably left wishing they’d watched a DVD of a Marvel movie instead.

Marvel’s subsequent attempts would be more successful. Back in 2013 the company had struck a deal with Netflix to produce five shows featuring its more street-level characters Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, and Luke Cage.

The idea began with Jeph Loeb, a former DC and Marvel writer who’s now head of Marvel TV. While watching the climatic battle in The Avengers, Loeb wondered what was going on in other parts of New York City. He pitched a concept to Netflix, and the resulting deal would follow the Marvel movies template. The characters would be introduced in solo adventures before coming in a mega-crossover, here called The Defenders.

The Netflix series were surprisingly adult and gritty and drew critical acclaim for their smart writing and brutal fight choreography.

“I think the other part that separates us from, let’s just say, our distinguished competition is that we take place in a very real, grounded world,” Loeb told Entertainment Weekly. “We’ve always said that there is a fifth Defender, and that is New York.”

Comics books are everywhere, and all the success in TV and movies has allowed some geeks to declare victory. After years of being ridiculed for their love of superheroes and having the culture remain on the periphery, superheroes are now mainstream. They’re globally popular and big business, to boot. But as has often been the case in the superhero industry, it’s unclear whether the creators behind all of these great characters are benefitting as they should.

Both Marvel and DC pay their talent a fee when one of their creations is used in a movie or television series, though the money handed out differs from project to project, character to character, and creator to creator.

Keeping track of who did what over all those years and comics is now a vital issue in an age when even a minor supporting character can play a major role in a blockbuster film. A few years ago DC hired a staffer to go through every comic book it had published and identify the first appearances of every character in order to correctly identify the creators behind them. It took the staffer literally years.

Many in the comic book industry find Hollywood’s new obsession with their work exciting—but they find the business end confusing. Checks will arrive in the mail for various sums with almost no explanation of what the money is for. A toy? Lunchbox profit sharing?

The amounts can be both exciting and disappointing.

“When the Green Lantern movie came out and [my cocreation] Kilowog was in it, the guy in charge of royalties at DC said to me, [writer] Len Wein got $500,000 for Lucius Fox [played by Morgan Freeman] in the Batman movies, you’ll get a check somewhere in six figures for this,” says writer Steve Englehart. “Then the movie tanked, so I ended up getting something like ten thousand bucks.”

“The most I ever got was a portion of the option for the Constantine feature film,” says Steve Bissette, cocreator of Constantine. “I got a check for $45,000.”

In some cases talent have seen their share decrease with the rising popularity of comic book properties. A character’s appearance that would pay $500 in the 1993 series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman now might pay $300 for an appearance in the CW’s Supergirl.

The drop could be attributed to DC Entertainment consolidating its production in house instead of using outside companies.

“One hand doesn’t have to pay the other hand as much as they would if there was a third hand—an independent company—and so it’s beneficial to DC obviously,” says one artist.

In another case a character’s appearance in Superman Returns rewarded its cocreator 5 percent of a $1 million licensing fee that the movie studio paid DC, or $50,000. By the time Man of Steel rolled around, the licensing fee had apparently fallen to $760,000 because the cocreator’s share was $38,000.

But these payments are for characters created after the revenue-sharing agreements of the 1980s. Artists and writers whose creations first appeared before those contracts aren’t often as lucky. Many are entitled to nothing, although some are paid an honorarium. Swamp Thing cocreator Bernie Wrightson got just $2,000 when his creature starred in a feature film.

David Michelinie, who cocreated James Rhodes, aka War Machine (played by Don Cheadle in the Iron Man and Avengers movies), says he was fully aware he was “entitled to get nothing, either money or credit” for use of some of his characters.

“But no one put a gun to my head and forced me to create new intellectual properties,” he says. “I was an adult, I knew what I was doing, and I have no legal right to complain. Characters I created later on—[Spider-Man villains] Venom, Carnage—were done with revenue-sharing contracts, and I did receive a portion of earnings from T-shirts, action figures, and so forth.”

Marvel and its new owner, Disney, appear to be fully aware of the value of its library of characters. A few years ago the conglomerate began attempting to buy creators out of their share of ownership for a flat fee.

“Within the last decade Marvel has gone back and revisited a lot of those agreements so that the creators had no ownership,” writer Ron Marz says. “If I owned 1.5 percent of something in a movie, there would be difficulty with the rights. So there were new contracts and payments. It’s all very obvious in the new contract: you get this much if a character becomes an action figure and this much if it appears in a TV or movie. It gave a framework to everything.”

Other creators weren’t so eager to sign the new deal.

“Marvel contacted me around 2010. They didn’t offer much,” Ann Nocenti says. “I was just at a Comic Con, and I asked [another writer], ‘Are you getting these letters?’ and they said, ‘Yeah, don’t sign ’em.’”