'Now we have a lot of money in the bank.'ĭC is playing a bit of catch-up, though executives at DC and Warner Bros. 'These are very good times for us,' he said of his once-broke company. 'When I started, forget it - it was tough, it was banging on doors,' he said.įor Arad, the box-office success of the X-Men and Spider-Man, with two hit movies apiece and more sequels on the way, is lucrative vindication that Marvel's characters still have life and relevance in today's pop culture. When Arad began offering his characters to the major studios, it was 'absolutely not obvious' to moviemakers that audiences had any interest in seeing superheroes anymore. When Arad, a former toymaker from Israel, took the reins in the late 1990s, he immediately started trying to drum up Hollywood attention and scored an early surprise hit with Blade, about an African American character who also happens to be half-vampire. Many credit Marvel Studios chief executive Avi Arad for launching comic-book heroes into a new age of profitability. DC announced an agreement with Sony Online Entertainment for such a game last week Marvel has a deal for such a game with Vivendi Universal Games. To keep the revenue stream flowing, both companies have deals to develop 'massively multi-player' online games, virtual universes of Marvel or DC characters that fans will pay a monthly fee to inhabit through their computers or game consoles. Marvel's 'Ghost Rider,' starring Nicolas Cage as motorcycle stunt performer Johnny Blaze, is set for a release next summer.

Marvel, riding high off its major successes with the 'X-Men' and 'Spider-Man' movies, is digging deep into its catalogue and working on screen adaptations of Iron Man, Submariner, Thor, Silver Surfer and others. Superman is on his way back to the big screen, as is his DC colleague Wonder Woman.

The decline of comic books since the 1970s made the issue largely irrelevant, but video games, online role-playing games and new movies are bringing the classic DC-Marvel conflict back to life. The difference between DC and Marvel used to be one of those cultural dividing lines - a slightly geekier version of the Beatles-vs.-the-Stones question. 'Fantastic Four,' which opens July 8, belongs to Marvel Enterprises Inc.'s comics. 1 flick last week and took in a not-bad $48.7 million in its opening weekend. His latest adventure on the big screen, 'Batman Begins,' kicked off as the No. Crime-fighter Batman, after all, is an employee of DC Comics Inc., a division of Warner Bros.

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