Replies to post #32951 on POW! Entertainment Inc. (fka POWN)

[dsouth]

We obviously feel differently about the situation. Feel free not to pursue your appraisal rights as a shareholder. Each shareholder gets to make that choice. However, when that choice is not given it breaks Delaware law. That's all that I am getting at.

[rickn23]

Three things:

I think the company would have more money had Stan, Gill, and Art, properly and fairly ran the company.

I think the IP can be valued, separately from the business. Magic Storm (POW! was a part of this) paid $500,000 upfront for "The Annihilator" IP. It appears that Focus Media paid an average of $577,778 per IP for Ricco Media. And, Ricco Media was showing losses for the two years prior to being sold. From all appearances the IP is worth more than $500,000 each.

There was no indication POW! was for sale, until it was announced that Camsing was going to buy it. It appears that a majority of shareholders (Stan, Gill and two trusts) had already agreed to the deal (signed a voting agreement for the deal). It isn't clear that voting agreement could be broken for a higher offer.

[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