POW! Entertainment Inc. (fka POWN)

[rickn23]

I finally found it.

To kick-start its movies, Marvel borrowed $525 million using just 10 characters (IP) as collateral. This would suggest IP value of $52.5 million each for Marvel's IP (some IP have multiple characters).

But, to get that $525 million, Marvel had to put something up as collateral: almost everything they had.

The deal included 10 properties — Captain America, The Avengers, Nick Fury, Black Panther, Ant-Man, Cloak & Dagger, Doctor Strange, Hawkeye, Power Pack, and Shang-Chi — and if the Marvel Studios plan failed, they would lose the rights to every single one of those properties. The bank would own them and the plans for a Marvel Cinematic Universe would be dead.

http://screencrush.com/marvel-bankruptcy-billions/

But the final piece of the puzzle involved both math and some creative curating. The innovative deal that Marvel and Merrill Lynch slowly put together, and finally announced in April 2005, was nonrecourse financing. That meant that Marvel wouldn’t have to put up any cash, but would receive $525 million over an eight-year period to make movies from 10 characters: Ant-Man, the Avengers, Black Panther, Captain America, Doctor Strange, Hawkeye, Nick Fury, Power Pack, and, lastly, Shang-Chi, the Master of Kung Fu. Unless you’re a comic-book fan, chances are that you’ve never heard of half those characters. That’s because Marvel’s collateral to their financial backers, if the first four of the films failed, was simply the movie rights to the remaining six characters. (Even if Marvel lost those rights, they’d still retain merchandising revenues.) “If [the backers] wanted to make films of those characters, they still had to pay a service fee of 5 percent of the gross,” says Maisel. So even if the plan failed entirely, “we were no worse off than current situation.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_pivot/2012/09/marvel_comics_and_the_movies_the_business_story_behind_the_avengers_.html