Marvel hasnt always been a highly lucrative, thriving multimedia business. In point of fact, only a dozen years before the release of the first Iron Man movie in 2008, Marvel was in crisis, having grossly overestimated the longevity of the comics speculator bubble and placed far too many eggs in one basket. Today? Thanks to the success of Marvel Studios in the last seven years and the purchase of the company by Disney, Marvel is one of corporate Americas touchstones for creative and commercial synergy. What does that mean in non-business speak? It means that they have a reputation for knocking it out of the park in terms of both their revenue and the critical acclaim of their products. Their brand is overwhelmingly popular and astonishingly financially successful. WWE is, broadly speaking, in the same kind of business as Marvel. Remember that old chestnut about putting smiles on faces? Well, on a superficial level both companies are engaged in delivering narratives about heroes and villains, good versus evil, triumph snatched from the jaws of despair, that kind of thing. On a deeper level, both companies are devoted to marketing those narratives and the core intellectual properties that are involved in them: milking the characters and situations theyve created, the worlds that theyve built, for every last buck. Put in laymans terms, both Marvel and WWE are in the business of telling, and then selling stories. Now, Marvels brand is one of the biggest and brightest in the world: their movies have made well over $9 billion in worldwide cinemas alone - never mind on home media or with licensing, merchandising tie ins, or even the return on investment that the comic books have shown as a consequence of the films. WWE is big, but its not Marvel big. Are there lessons that Vince McMahon and WWEs executives can learn from Marvels rise to prominence? Absolutely - and here are only ten of them.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
