Strictly speaking, "Howard the Duck," which appeared 22 years before "Iron Man," was the real beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (without counting the short version of Captain America that appeared in front of the movie in the 1940s).
It's just that the word-of-mouth and box office of this movie are too tragic, so tragic that the two companies involved in the production have to sell their properties afterwards.
△ "Howard Strange Duck"
Amazingly, the garage auctions of these two companies have rewritten the history of Hollywood and silently influenced many of the blockbuster movies we've seen over the past 20 years. It's time to glorify this duck who sacrificed his life for the art of cinema...
The duck that appears in the "Guardian of the Galaxy" Easter egg is not a casual cutscene, Howard the Duck is the grandfather of Marvel movies - 1973 Marvel on the one hand worried that comic book readers were tired of superheroes, and on the other hand, it was also red from Disney, which made a lot of money from animal characters, so it decided to create this duck to change the taste of readers.
In the comics, Howard Duck originally lives in Duckworld and is trapped on Earth due to a magical accident. His superpower is named Quak-Fu (Quack-Fu?) ) martial arts, and later learned some magic under Dr. Strange.
To Marvel's surprise, this sophisticated, rude, mouthless duck is quite popular, and even has the potential to adapt film and television works.
△ Cameo Reunion 4's Howard Monster Duck
At the same time, Disney's lawyer's dog nose immediately smelled an innocent smell, and immediately sent Marvel to court on the charge of plagiarizing Donald Duck, forcing Howard Tork Duck to wear pants from then on, so as to draw a line with the one in Disney's own pot that did not wear pants.
George Lucas wanted to make Howard The Duck long before Star Wars. He loves the humorous and absurd nature of the comics, and even feels that Howard's Strange Duck has the color of Film Noir.
After the temporary end of the Star Wars Cinematic Universe in 1983, Lucas, the most profitable independent investor in film history, felt that Howard Duck was his next golden hen.
He tried his best to sell the project with Marvel to Universal Pictures, and Universal, who had been worried about missing out on Star Wars movies and Indiana Jones movies for many years, finally found the opportunity to work with Lucas and Marvel, and decided to bet on Howard Monster Duck.
The first epic mistake of this production came:
Universal positioned the film as a summer blockbuster, and "The Lion King" would not happen until eight years later, and no one would have considered the animation a summer blockbuster before that, so Universal's distribution contract required Lucas to shoot in real life.
Lucas, who had originally planned to make animation, was very confident in the technology of his special effects company ILM, and decided to make a real "duck" movie instead.
△ Howard Strange Duck who made a cameo appearance in Marvel's latest anime "What If..."
The second epic mistake was a fine-tuning of the original style.
To cater to a broader target audience, director Willard Huyck and screenwriter Gloria Katz decided to rewrite Howard Duck's originally more adult-style character.
△ Howard Monster Duck vs Donald Duck
It may be easier to understand by using the examples of people you are familiar with:
Imagine fine-tuning a deadpool with a broken mouth or a drunken horse boy Bojack into a docile, positive-looking character...
... Yes, we're 100 percent sure the movie is simply Titanic, heading straight for the iceberg.
As a result, "Heavenly Soldier" was not only shortlisted for seven Golden Raspberry Awards, but also "won" four of them. The media at the time even described the epic failure as "Fabulous Flop" (a gorgeous capsizing).
Because of the various expensive special effects (each mechanical duck made by ILM costs as much as $2 million), the duck movie cost $37 million.
But after the release, the U.S. box office was less than 16 million, and the international box office totaled only 37 million, and the actual amount that could be received was not half the cost.
By the standards of the 1980s, it was an unprecedented loss.
Universal, who is responsible for the distribution, bears the brunt.
Frank Price, the CEO of Universal Pictures, and Sid Sheinberg, the chairman of the group, even wrestled with each other at the meeting over who was the idiot who released the case.
In the end, frank price took the blame and stepped down.
△ Reunion 4 group battle Thanos, when the camera is magnified 10 times, accidentally captured Howard monster duck?
Marvel, whose comic book sales were in decline in the 1980s, had hoped that the film business would become a superhero to rescue the company's finances.
However, the duck divine power did not play a role, Marvel can only float on the verge of bankruptcy for more than 10 years, and successively sold works such as "Spider-Man", "X-Men", "Marvel Four Superman" and other works to other film companies at low prices to realize the day.
Then there's George Lucas, the father of Star Wars, who is suddenly in debt. After the end of Star Wars (a while), the income from peripheral goods has begun to decline rapidly, but he chose to divorce his wife at this time of high value, and must pay high alimony.
Not to mention the fact that the dude spent $50 million on the corporate headquarters: Skywalker Ranch.
So Lucas was forced to sell his property, and finally decided to sell the computer animation department, an experimental unit of the group that had just been established and who knows when it would start making money.
Lucas offered $30 million, and his good friend, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, said $5 million, don't pull it down.
Halfway through, Disney was also in internal discussions about whether to join the bidding for $15 million, but its head of animation, Jeffrey Katzenberg, rejected the proposal.
Kaisenberg himself started with traditional hand-drawn animation, probably did not think that computer animation was anything remarkable, and many years later, his self-owned DreamWorks Animation (Dreamwork Animation) began to focus on hand-drawn animation, and by the time he was forced to turn his focus to computer animation, it was too late to stop the gorgeous capsizing of DreamWorks Animation.
At the end of the garage auction, Jobs doubled his bid to buy the technology division and 40 employees for $10 million. Then they had a gorgeous new name: Pixar.
△ "What If..." Darcy's wedding to Howard's strange duck
20 years later, Jobs resold Pixar to Disney for $7.4 billion, 740 times the price of buying the small ILM division that year.
Strange because the acquisition was paid for by Disney shares, after the transaction was completed, Pixar's boss Jobs became Disney's largest legal shareholder, and even joined the Disney board. Wait, isn't all this Howard's revenge!?