In 1994, a nearly bankrupt Marvel sold the X-Men's film rights to Fox for $2.6 million. Buying them back cost Disney $71.3 billion. And it still took 7 more years before Marvel cast its own X-Men team. The 1994 deal is one of the worst in Hollywood history. Marvel was bleeding cash and filed for bankruptcy two years later, so it licensed everything it could. Fox got X-Men live-action and animation rights outright. Marvel kept roughly 2% of ticket sales. Fox turned that $2.6 million into 13 films grossing $6.08 billion. Marvel's cumulative cut over two decades was on the order of $100 million. They watched other people make billions off characters they created, then watched Fox torch Dark Phoenix for a $100 million loss on the way out. So Disney paid $71.3 billion for Fox in 2019, with X-Men as the crown jewel, and did something almost no studio can afford to do. Nothing. Feige spent seven years letting the Fox continuity die. The only mutant movie Marvel released in that window, Deadpool and Wolverine, was a farewell tour of the old universe, and it made $1.34 billion. He waited until audiences missed the X-Men again. Now it's moving fast. Sadie Sink debuted as Jean Grey in Spider-Man this week. Samara Weaving is Emma Frost, the role that reportedly got the most thorough search of the entire cast. The reboot lands around 2028. That's 34 years from fire sale to do-over. The franchise Marvel sold for $2.6 million came back at 27,000 times the price, and Disney's bet is that the wait was the cheap part.

@aakashgupta @mrshadeed even bad licensing deals can payoff in the end eh?