For example, what if Sony had bought all the movie rights to Marvel’s comic book line in the late 1990s?.
The company wasn’t really offering everything — at that date, Fox already had the X-Men rights, and the Fantastic Four rights were… complicated.
But what Sony was being offered was, essentially, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a decade before Marvel would turn that into a reality in its own right.
Would Sony have made that intuitive leap itself, and if not, could the Marvel properties have come so far without the shared universe setting?
Moreover, would a studio that had other properties (and priorities) than superheroes have launched into the two-movies-per-year cycle that helped Marvel maintain its momentum …?. »