I Become A Noble in England

Like MGM, Marvel also had its glorious moments, otherwise it would not have become one of the symbols of American culture.

Marvel Comics was founded in 1939. In October of that year, the first comic book was launched on the market, and its first superhero, Namor the Aquaman, was created at the same time.

Captain America, launched in March 1941, caused another sensation, selling 1 million copies of the comic book in his first appearance.

Since then, Marvel has successively launched superheroes such as the Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, and Iron Man.

Marvel's fate is as ups and downs as its heroes. After a series of accidents such as World War II, Marvel has been transferred many times.

In 1986, Marvel was sold to New World Pictures by its parent company Cadence Industries; three years later, it was sold to MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings...

In 1994, Andrews Group and ME reorganized Marvel into Marvel Holdings; in 1996, Marvel was involved in the power struggle between Carl Icahn and Perelman.

On December 27 of that year, Marvel officially declared bankruptcy, and later with the help of many parties, it escaped from bankruptcy.

The comics industry as a whole was in decline at the time, and Marvel was in a financial crisis.

In order to overcome the difficulties, Marvel decided to sell the filming rights of superheroes.

For example, Fox obtained the license for X-Men and launched the movie X-Men in 2000; Sony obtained the license for Spider-Man and launched the movie Spider-Man in 2002.

Back in 1999, Marvel sold the film rights to Spider-Man to Sony for $7 million. Sony made $1.6 billion from the first two Spider-Man movies, but Marvel only got $75 million of that.

In 2005, Marvel's licensing business had become its largest revenue business, with licensing revenue of US$230 million in 2005, accounting for nearly 60% of the total revenue that year.

Seeing that those big movie studios have made a lot of money through their own IPs, Marvel, which owns a huge number of IPs, is naturally unwilling to give up.

Just last year, Marvel established a film company, and then used the copyrights of some characters as collateral to borrow $225 million from Merrill Lynch to prepare to shoot their own superhero movies. The first movie they chose was "Iron Man."

Marvel's decision can be said to be a desperate gamble.

Barron naturally knew that Marvel's gamble was finally successful. In his previous life, "Iron Man", released in 2008, grossed 585 million US dollars worldwide, helping Marvel out of its predicament.

Marvel has made a total of three "Iron Man" movies, with a total global box office of 2.38 billion US dollars. The DVDs of the three movies have sold more than 17 million copies in total, earning 300 million US dollars, making it one of the most profitable film series in the world.

In 2009, Disney acquired Marvel Entertainment for US$4.24 billion in cash and stock. Then, under Disney's leadership, Marvel gradually began to recover the scattered superhero movie copyrights. Marvel became a money-making machine for Disney: movies, animations, toys, games, and theme parks continued to develop in an industrial chain.

If you want to invest in Marvel, you naturally can't just wait until they succeed before joining, then the conditions will naturally be higher.

They still need timely help, just like now, Marvel needs to mortgage the copyright of its characters to get loans to make movies, so if someone is willing to provide them with funds, it would definitely be something they would be more than happy to receive.

This time, Blue Valley Capital CEO Annika Dawson proposed a full acquisition agreement to Marvel, so the negotiations have lasted for nearly two months. The main focus was on negotiating with Marvel's management and shareholders on specific terms such as the acquisition price and support for Marvel after the acquisition.

Initially, Blue Valley Capital proposed to acquire Marvel for US$1.5 billion in all cash. After all, Marvel was not in a good situation at the time. The company almost entirely relied on the sale of superhero licenses to survive. As for comics...how many people still read comics in this era?

Moreover, this time, mortgaging the copyrights of many characters to obtain a large loan for filming the movie also brought great pressure to Marvel, especially its management and shareholders.

In fact, they borrowed a full $525 million from Merrill Lynch - with 10 characters including Thor, Captain America, Nick Fury, Hawkeye, etc. as collateral. If they failed to repay the loan on time, Merrill Lynch would immediately own these characters.

In this do-or-die battle, Marvel Studios borrowed so much money in order to prepare to shoot several movies including "Iron Man" and "The Hulk".

There was also a lot of opposition to their decision among Marvel's shareholders. After all, although Marvel can only rely on licensing to maintain the company's operations now, it is at least slightly more stable. But if they make such a big bet and fail in the end, then I'm afraid what awaits Marvel will be bankruptcy again.

After all, many superhero movies have failed miserably before, and the popularity of "Iron Man" and "The Hulk" is far less than that of Spider-Man and X-Men.

Therefore, there are still many shareholders who are willing to avoid risks and sell their shares to the "takeover hero" Blue Valley Capital. For them, all they need is a suitable price.

However, for Marvel's management at this time, since they can mortgage the character copyrights and borrow more than 500 million to independently shoot a superhero movie, they still want to take a gamble.

There is no mistake in the poem, post, content, and read the book on 6, 9, and bar!

To convince them to sell Marvel to Blue Valley Capital, we need to work hard to support Marvel after the acquisition.

So most of the time, it was them that Annika Dawson needed to convince.

She was sure that an agreement could be reached to stipulate the support that Blue Valley Capital could provide to Marvel after acquiring it, including funding and other resources.

In addition, Annika Dawson also found Avi Arad, an important figure in Marvel at the time, and Kevin Feige, the CEO of Marvel Studios at the time who was discovered by him. She promised that Blue Valley Capital would strongly support their "Marvel Universe" concept and help them realize this grand vision.

In fact, these two people are the main promoters of Marvel Studios' film plans. Therefore, after a lot of negotiations, Blue Valley Capital finally made some concessions and agreed to acquire Marvel Entertainment (which includes Marvel Studios, Marvel Games, Marvel Television, etc.) for US$1.7 billion in cash, and will subsequently inject US$300 million into Marvel Entertainment to support their subsequent development.

In addition, there are many more detailed provisions in this acquisition agreement regarding the future development of Marvel. In a nutshell, if you want money, you will get money; if you want resources, you will find a way to get them.

After getting such a promise, everyone was finally happy, and the acquisition of Marvel Entertainment was made public.