Steve Strauss at TheStreet.com:
For me, the interesting thing about Iron Man is that it is Marvel’s first foray into solo movie producing. For years Marvel has been licensing its superheroes to big studios and then acting as a simple co-producer.
Then Marvel wised up.
Why license your fantastic product for a fraction of what you could make when you can instead take it in-house, become the studio yourself, cut out the middle man and keep all the profit?
$1 billion in gross sales (the Spiderman franchise) can be a very persuasive argument.
So what does this have to do with small business, you ask? Plenty.
Until recently, small businesses that created a product often found themselves in a position not unlike that of Marvel: They had to hire expensive third parties to create the product, and that really cut into margins.
For instance, about a decade ago I had an associate who wanted to create a new back support system. As it was too expensive to produce here, he traveled to China and found a manufacturer who then created and shipped his product to him.
These days there are an incredible array of tools that allow us to create (or just buy) products better, cheaper and faster. The point is, there is no need for any small business to behave like Marvel pre-Iron Man. It is so easy these days to literally or figuratively take your own production in-house that it would be a shame not to.
Editor’s note: Here are the latest box office numbers for Iron Man:$222,485,000. WOW!
Photo by Marvel.
Robyn on May 18th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Rich, you’d need a lot of talent to do some things like produce top rate movies. Do you consider Marvel Comics a small business? How do you define small business?
Rich on May 19th, 2008 at 11:53 am
No, Robyn, I don’t consider Marvel Comics a small business.
If you had read the entire post you would have seen this:
“So what does this have to do with small business, you ask? Plenty.
Until recently, small businesses that created a product often found themselves in a position not unlike that of Marvel: They had to hire expensive third parties to create the product, and that really cut into margins.
For instance, about a decade ago I had an associate who wanted to create a new back support system. As it was too expensive to produce here, he traveled to China and found a manufacturer who then created and shipped his product to him.
These days there are an incredible array of tools that allow us to create (or just buy) products better, cheaper and faster. The point is, there is no need for any small business to behave like Marvel pre-Iron Man.”
So the jist of the post is that the middleman is history.