Marvel and DC actually co-own the copyrights to the word "superhero".
Joss Whedon's S.H.I.E.L.D to ABC!
- Thread starter Admiral_Young
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Not that I'm aware of. Lionsgate(I think) did that horrid film that ended up airing as a Sci-Fi movie of the week but that was over 5yrs ago. Pretty sure he's fully back under the Marvel Studios banner.
Perhaps I am thinking of Swamp Thing. I've always gotten the two of them confused!
^^^
Blasphemy!!!
Blasphemy!!!
No, they share a trademark, not a copyright. A copyright protects a literary or artistic work, while a trademark is a registered word, phrase, or symbol serving as an identifier for a distinct brand or product. What the trademark means is that nobody but Marvel and DC can use the phrase "super hero" or variations thereon in the title of a publication or product, or otherwise in a marketing context such as in an advertising slogan. But you can use it in the body of a work, as I was able to do in my novel Only Superhuman.
Here's a FAQ about it, and here's an article with more.
Thanks for the correction and the info.
Either way, are the Marvel movie rights treated the same as television?
All the live action Marvel movie rights are treated the same way. If Marvel Studios doesn't own it...they can't use it.
Mister Fandango
Fleet Captain
"Can't" is hardly the right word. They can use them if they get permission. Which they won't even bother with, but it's still not as definitive as "can't" implies.
I'm really looking forward to this, but I have a really bad feeling now that it's scheduled up against NCIS. I believe NCIS' audience skews older, but it still gets 20ish million viewers almost every week. Hopefully S.H.I.E.L.D. will draw the younger male audience ABC is hoping it will draw.
I'd heard otherwise, at least for some of the ancillaries of the properties currently possessed by Fox and such, but it would make sense. They should at least see about borrowing use of 'mutants' so they can deal with the societal implications of them on a level a bit more in-depth than the movies allow.
They could ask for permission, as was stated above, and apparently negotiations to use stuff owned by either Fox or Sony I'm assuming is possible...so yeah "can't" was probably an incorrect word to use on my part...so it's not impossible, just very unlikely.
Well I mean, I had read somewhere that some of the live action TV rights were handled separately from their film rights back in the 90s when everyone was buying them up, and some had reverted back to Marvel. Speculation blog or the like, probably, so I'm not surprised to hear it was wrong.
I doubt that Fox would "lend" them anything regarding X-Men. That all being said...they still have a pretty large sandbox to play around with.
Ugh. That does seem iffy.
Question: In this day and age, have the networks gotten around to factoring in DVR's yet to the ratings calculus? I can see people DVR-ing and watching both SHIELD and NCIS. Maybe it sucks that the commercials get skipped over, but tell you what, that's how I watch all shows these days, even when there's no conflict.
They can pay me to watch commercials, I'm open to that if they pay me enough, but honestly short of that, I'm not going to lose any sleep over skipping over them, even if all my favorite shows get canceled.
The pop-up commercials seem to be in vogue, as annoying as they are, and of course product placement is big (cf Windows 8 in Arrow), so it's not like there're no efforts to counter DVR's.
I think the make or break for SHIELD will be DVR numbers. NCIS may pull in the live viewers, but the young male audience will DVR SHIELD and watch it within the next few days. I expect it to have high Live +3 numbers.
To be precise, Fox and Sony don't own the properties; Marvel Entertainment does. But ME has granted those studios an exclusive license to adapt those properties in live-action film. They hold onto that license as long as they use it, but if they let a character lie fallow long enough, as recently happened with Daredevil, the Punisher, Ghost Rider, and Blade, then their license expires and Marvel is free to make their own movies with those characters.
As for the TV rights, what I can find online suggests that Marvel/Disney has TV rights to all Marvel characters, with no distinction drawn between animated and live-action rights, just between TV and film rights. I'm not sure how accurate that is, though, since Sony was a co-producer on The Spectacular Spider-Man, and the reason that successful show was cancelled prematurely was because Sony ceded the TV (or animation) rights in exchange for keeping their movie license.
I'd rather not. The problem is that X-Men is for the sociological impact of Mutants and all the metaphors that come with it. Avengers is about superheroes fighting badguys. The trailer for the show talks about New York changing everything. However, if there were mutants walking around, people would be less surprised by the events of The Avengers (sure, aliens is pretty surprising, but it would mitigate things a bit).
Fox sued Marvel over Mutant X saying they had exclusive rights to the X-Men and that the show was similar enough to X-Men that it violated that agreement, so Fox's X-Men rights at least must extend to live action television.
