Hacker News Reader

Comment by philjohn | Hacker News Reader

It's how Marvel funded their early films - a 200m revolving line of credit.

I don't know much about this, but some quick research shows that it was actually for $525 million [1], and interestingly, they put up their intellectual property as collateral ("a batch of 10 Marvel characters, including Captain America, the Avengers... and Nick Fury").

It's worth noting that a line of credit can be against the business itself, the owner of the business, or it can be backed with specific collateral, such as stocks, for example. If you are large enough, the bank will get creative on what you can use as collateral, although I'd imagine that in general it's easier to borrow against a Manhattan office building (many possible buyers) than the intellectual rights to comic-book characters (very few possible buyers).

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110805065546/https://variety.c...

It's interesting that they were able to use creative assets as collateral but also the creative assets that would be worthless in a scenario where Marvel was unable to pay back the line of credit. If the movies do well, no problem. If they tank, who cares about the IP?

This is one of the many reasons I am not in finance.

I believe that by this point Sony had Spider-Man and Fox had X-men, both of which had proven to have legs. There was likely little doubt that a collection of other tried-and-true titles were worth a significant amount, even if Marvel Studios themselves failed to make a hit.

Makes sense. It's just way outside my wheelhouse so I can't imagine taking a 500+ million dollar gamble on, well, anything.

This is established IP in an adjacent media. Marvel first line of business used to be comics which in turn generated sales for tie-in products. In this context it was probably relatively easy to see how much these IP made every year.

Ironically, I was reading about this last night. The loan was collateralized on the movie rights only. But the market had been proven by that point.

Makes sense. The value is based on the IP assuming there is no successful movie franchise. Probably with some risk calculation as to the probability that the films would be successful.

Marvel's IPs have always been successful in comics, cartoons, toys and merchandising.

Utilizing creative assets as collateral is just hilarious on so many levels.

But seriously when will this all get NFTed?????

When an NFT is recognised as a legal contract in law and is able to preclude any copy of the asset in question.

Edit: and allows you to have all the terms and conditions any other contract is able to provide.

Hopefully never.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com