Marvel Entertainment (Disney)

Marvel's predecessor, Timely Comics, was founded by Martin Goodman in 1939 — the same year Superman's success had demonstrated that superhero comics could be enormously profitable. Timely's first issue introduced the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner. Captain America followed in 1941, punching Adolf Hitler on the cover three months before the United States entered World War II. The patriotic superhero sold nearly a million copies per issue. After the war, superhero comics fell out of fashion and Timely pivoted to romance, horror, and western genres.

Marvel Comics — as the company had been renamed — was nearly shut down in 1961 when publisher Martin Goodman instructed editor Stan Lee to create a superhero team to compete with DC's Justice League. Lee, planning to quit, decided to create characters he actually wanted to write — flawed, human, relatable heroes rather than godlike paragons. The Fantastic Four launched in 1961, followed by Spider-Man, the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, and the X-Men. The Marvel Age of Comics had begun. Lee and artist Jack Kirby created most of Marvel's iconic characters in a five-year creative explosion.

Marvel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 1996, the victim of a disastrous expansion into trading cards, toy manufacturing, and sticker companies that had been financed with junk bonds. To raise cash, Marvel sold the film rights to its characters at prices that reflected its desperation: Spider-Man went to Sony for $7 million; the X-Men went to Fox for a similarly modest sum; Daredevil, Blade, Ghost Rider, and dozens of others were licensed to various studios. Marvel retained the rights to characters no studio wanted — including Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America.

Marvel Studios, using the characters nobody else had wanted, produced Iron Man in 2008 — financing it partly through a $525 million credit facility secured against the characters' film rights. If the film failed, Marvel would lose the characters. Iron Man grossed $585 million worldwide. The end credits scene — Nick Fury appearing to tell Tony Stark "You've become part of a bigger universe" — announced the Marvel Cinematic Universe concept. No studio had ever attempted to build a shared cinematic universe across multiple films. Marvel had announced it with a post-credits scene that most viewers initially missed.

Disney acquired Marvel Entertainment in August 2009 for $4 billion — at the time considered expensive for a comic book company. The MCU subsequently grossed over $30 billion at the global box office, making it the highest-grossing film franchise in history. The characters that Marvel had sold for millions during its bankruptcy — Spider-Man, X-Men — eventually returned to Marvel through licensing renegotiations. The company that had filed for bankruptcy in 1996 had, under Disney's ownership, generated more cinema revenue than any franchise in history.