I disagree that this was the motivation for wanting to buy a comics company. While certainly a bonus, a lot of the discussion and omakes have centered around Lucasfilm making movies with certain comics characters as well as working with legendary comics creators. Marvel is becoming resurgent, DC will have a successful Superman Movie. In Charlton, the talent already has left (note that most of their popular titles are cancelled and they ceased publishing at this time). The only thing that is worth while in the company is the IP (which is largely not publishing right now and is not overly popular) and the aging infrastructure.
Their publishing arm is already starting a downward spiral and their actual pritning presses are becoming obsolete. By the 80's (not to far from here) they are so obsolete that it is one of the reasons the company failed.
Not what I'm talking about. You're still operating with the "Purchase Marvel" mindset. What I'm presenting you is the benefits of and motivation for purchasing Charlton, not Marvel. Yes, I'm aware they are slowing production, I acknowledged this as a benefit in one of my earlier Charlton posts as something that makes the purchase cheaper. The problem is that you're fixating too much. Despite Charlton currently slowing down, preparing to die, they still carry a reputation as a place for young talent to begin making a name for themselves before they move on to Marvel or DC. We swoop in, and with our personal reputation along with the reputation of Lucasfilm, along with the IP we have available to entice new writers, we'll have no issue at all bringing in new talent. Particularly if we improve the pay, which is one of the things that kept new talent around despite the flagging company before management decided to cut down on page rates in order to pocket more cash. The talent is gone for now, but it won't be difficult to bring it back. Yeah, the IP is not
currently publishing or
currently overly popular, but again, you're fixating and failing to see anything else. The "not currently publishing" is irrelevant considering that we can just start that up, it's a non issue. The point about popularity falls flat when, again, these characters helped create one of the most revered and influential comics
EVER in the Watchmen. Not to mention, characters like Captain Atom, Question, Blue Beetle, and Peacemaker have all managed to become popular under DC with the right talent. Blue Beetle was also able to maintain high popularity and a cult following for
YEARS even when no Blue Beetle comics were being published, with fans even starting their own fan comics line(I forget what it was called, but people like GRRM and a bunch of future Marvel and DC people were involved, with one of them becoming a future Editor-in-Chief of DC IIRC). It's not especially difficult, you're just saying that you don't want to put in that work and instead want to coast on Marvel IP that the thread itself has said they don't want to do anything with until the MCU so it's a big expensive nothing burger. And again, Charlton has way more IP available to them that you're missing and can admittingly be difficult to find online because basically only the Action Hero Line shows up, but I do have that info on hand for the other IP that we can use. It's true that the infrastructure is aging, but it
does have it in the first place, which can't be said about Marvel and DC or almost any other comic company. They have the infrastructure and the existing connections, all we need to do is give them a cash infusion to help bring things back up-to-date and we'll be golden. Keep in mind, you and 13 others were not only willing, but eager to spend up to 150 million dollars on something you guys weren't even going to actually make use of. Doing everything necessary to get Charlton up to speed will almost certainly not cost anywhere near that outrageous amount. Charlton with it's issues will be a cheap purchase and we'll be able to put the money we saved by buying them back into them to bring everything back up to standard. At the end of it all, we almost certainly wouldn't spend even half of your lowball offer on Marvel of 100 million. With our IP like Star Wars and Conan, future IP like Gundam and Indiana Jones, and more, we can easily begin to recoup costs spent on Charlton, in doing so, we can more easily bring even better talent into Charlton than we get initially(which will almost certainly be determined by a roll just like with Dreamworks) and we can begin positioning Charlton to turn the Big 2 into the Big 3. Again, upgrading the infrastructure and the printing presses wouldn't cost anywhere near as much as purchasing Marvel for 100 million-150 million, which can easily be spent on reinvesting into Charlton or literally anything else, like the numerous other investments or IP purchases we wanted to make. Not to mention, someone mentioned waiting for them to begin going bankrupt like OTL, but there is no guarantee that will happen or be anywhere near as bad if it did, considering their greater success. To summarize the ridiculousness of this position, it involves not buying any other company because Marvel didn't accept and simply throwing our hands up in the air and giving up, we then have to wait for Marvel to
maybe start having financial troubles or go bankrupt like they did OTL that almost certainly won't be as bad as OTL and just hoping some other company doesn't buy them in the meantime, then we have to sit on the IP for years before doing anything with it because we're supposed to wait to do the MCU and Magoose set a hard cap on when we can do shared cinematic universes like that. I'm sorry, but this is incredibly dumb and is the position of "I couldn't win the game, so I just flipped the board."
Of course Marvel would become upset- we would be going from a potential long-term customer and creative partner to a competitor.
Irrelevant. We're still licensing through them and we don't
have to stop. We can easily continue to do so for years before we decide to begin publishing Star Wars comics through Charlton. We can also do it right away. We can literally do it whenever the fuck we want, so this point is moot. Also, we almost certainly wouldn't be seen as a competitor if we wait to republish the superhero characters, considering that the comics we would be producing wouldn't be overlapping. After all, Marvel and DC certainly don't see something like Archie Comics or IDW as a competitor in a real sense, because they aren't in the same market despite both being comic companies. They don't even really see companies like Image or Valiant as competitors despite being in the same space because they aren't anywhere near as big.
Jim Henson was successful, but hated the corporate/business stuff. It was one of the reasons he was going to sell to Disney before his death (which was exacerbated by overwork). Buying the company to have Lucasfilm do the financing/marketing/distribution/corporate stuff while letting Jim focus on creative would be the best of both worlds for both parties. As for aesthetics, Henson's company is capable of many impressive works of art that mesh well in various genres. Such as Dinosaurs or Farscape.
I mean sure, but it doesn't really change my position on it, which I already stated is less on anything concrete and more because it's just how I feel about Henson and his work. It's not a strictly rational position, but it's just how I feel about it.
