A Cause for Marvel: Rise of Films Based on Comic Books

In Kevin Smith’s upcoming film “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” his two goofball heroes discover that a comic book based on their lives is being made into a Hollywood movie. “After ‘X-Men’ hit at the box office,” their friend Brodie explains, “all the studios started buying up every comic property that they could get their hands on, looking for the next blockbuster.”

When I recount the scene to Avi Arad, he beams. “See, what did I tell you!” As head of Marvel Studios, Arad has been the driving force in trying to revive the fortunes of the troubled Marvel Enterprises, which filed for bankruptcy in 1998 and appeared dead in the water after years of management turmoil and a series of ugly Wall Street legal battles.

After the success of “X-Men,” the Marvel comic-based film that did $157 million at the box office last year and is one of the top-selling DVDs of all time, Marvel is back in a big way. Arad has made so many deals over lunch for Marvel properties that he could hold down a second job as a studio commissary food critic. “The Sony commissary has the best Chinese chicken salad,” he says. “Universal had good food too. And when I had a flat tire there, they were really great--they took care of it right away.”

Compared to today’s button-down executives, Arad is a colorful character with a refreshingly blunt manner. He dismisses Marvel’s previous management as “jerks galore,” gets intimately involved in every project (“Licensing your movies,” he explains, “is like sending your kids to kindergarten without visiting the school”) and signals the end of a pitch meeting by taking his hearing aids out of his ears.

Projects based on Marvel characters are rolling along at practically every studio in town. Sony is making “Spider-Man,” a $100-million film that will open next summer’s movie season on May 3. Twentieth Century Fox is developing “The Fantastic Four” and moving ahead with an “X-Men” sequel while making “Daredevil” with New Regency. Universal is doing “The Incredible Hulk,” with Ang Lee attached to direct, and “Namor the Submariner.” New Line, which had a hit with “Blade” in 1998, will release the sequel next year. Miramax’s Dimension Films is developing four Marvel projects, including “Werewolf by Night” and “Ghost Rider.” Arad also has a deal with Artisan Pictures to make films, TV shows and videos out of 15 Marvel characters, including Captain America and Black Panther; “Iron Fist” is slated to start filming later this year.

“Avi is a smart businessman who drives a very hard bargain,” says Universal Pictures Co-President Mary Parent, a key supporter of “Hulk.” “But when I see him walk into my office I smile because he’s so great to work with. He’s passionate about preserving the integrity of the material, and he loves his characters. How can you not like someone who wears a Spider-Man ring?”

Calling himself “the oldest rookie in Hollywood,” the 53-year-old Arad is a walking billboard for his enterprises. In addition to his ring, he wears black T-shirts adorned with Marvel characters, a Harley-Davidson belt buckle (he’s a part owner of two Harley restaurants) and a Spider-Man lapel button that was such a hit with “Spider-Man” producer Laura Ziskin that she says, “I told Avi I’d only do the movie if I got one of those lapel buttons.” His West L.A. offices are adorned with “X-Men” action characters, a blowup Spider-Man doll and other Marvel memorabilia.

Hollywood has always made movies out of comic books. But Marvel is especially hot now because movie technology has finally caught up with filmmakers’ imaginations. Many of today’s young filmmakers see comic books as a perfect vehicle to take advantage of the revolution in computer animation.

“The advances in computer animation were a key to this revival,” says new DreamWorks executive Michael De Luca, who had hits with “The Mask” and “Blade” when he was production chief at New Line. “I remember watching ‘The Abyss’ and the minute I saw the incredible [effects shot] where the water tentacle hits the water, I said to myself, ‘Now we can make ‘The Mask.’ ”

Arad boasts that when kids graduate from USC film school, “their first phone call is to us, saying, ‘I want to make a movie out of your comic books.’ ”

Arad has restored some much-needed luster to the Marvel brand and extracted the company from bad deals made by previous management. Wall Street remains skeptical: Marvel’s stock, which peaked at $35 a share in the early 1990s, trades at about $3.25. Arad’s response: “It was exaggerated on the high end, now it’s exaggerated on the low end. We’ll be fine.” He’s justifiably optimistic. Marvel has an enviable asset: a library of hundreds of time-tested characters, many with a huge following among young teens, Hollywood’s most avid moviegoers.

Marvel superheroes are perfectly in sync with the teen psyche. As producer Kevin Misher, who’s working on “Namor” with Arad, puts it: “Underneath their superpowers, the characters are fragile and emotionally vulnerable misfits, which is something that any teenager who has trouble fitting in can identify with.”

Arad has been taking advantage of comic-book enthusiasm from other quarters. He recently toured an advanced weaponry lab in New Mexico with “Hulk” director Lee to see the Air Force’s new generation of laser defense technology. “They’d love for us to make use of it in our movie,” Arad says. “It would be great publicity for them, to show how much progress they’ve made with cutting-edge technology, and it would be a way for our film to take science-fiction and make it a reality.”

For Arad, storytelling is just as important as cutting-edge technology. It’s a lesson he learned early in his career. Arad’s parents were Eastern European refugees who migrated to Israel not long after he was born. Arad spent three years in the Israeli Army from 1965 to 1968 and was injured during the Six-Day War. He won’t divulge details, except to say that he was in the hospital for 15 months.

He came to America in 1970 and went to Hofstra University in New York and later made a name for himself as a toy designer. In the late 1980s, he teamed up with Ike Perlmutter, now his partner at Marvel, who had the toy rights to Marvel characters through his company Toy Biz. They did a line of “X-Men” action figures, which led to a Saturday morning “X-Men” TV program. The show left a lasting imprint on Arad.

“Once I figured out that the TV show helped sell the action-figure characters, I knew films were the next step,” he says. “Look at ‘Blade.’ Prior to the movie, it was an obscure character. Today it’s a major franchise with two video games and a line of collectible action figures.”

In 1993, as part of Marvel’s acquisition of a big chunk of Toy Biz, Arad was installed as head of Marvel Studios, the division of Marvel devoted to film and TV projects. Not long afterward Marvel plunged into financial chaos during a nasty tug of war between Ronald Perelman and Carl Icahn for control of the company. The company’s key projects were either frozen or neglected. “Blade” came out without a Marvel logo on it. James Cameron, who’d wanted to make “Spider-Man,” eventually walked away, frustrated in part by litigation involving the company’s messy financial affairs.

Arad admits it took him a while to learn “the tricks of the trade” in Hollywood. He’s only been based in L.A. since last fall--before that he commuted from his home in Connecticut. He still groans about Marvel’s “X-Men” deal, which left millions on the table because the company didn’t negotiate a first-dollar gross deal. “Fox got the bargain of all time because we didn’t know our own worth,” he admits.

Arad now takes a more hands-on approach, sitting in on story meetings and helping select screenwriters and directors. You get a sense of Arad’s priorities seeing him meet with a screenwriter who’s pitching his take on “Namor,” a Marvel hero who rules the underwater kingdom of Atlantis. Arad likes stories rich in science and social issues. After he hears the writer’s pitch, Arad cautions him: “You need more Tom Clancy in there, so it’s not like ‘The Little Mermaid.’ And when I say Tom Clancy, I mean, how can we get a serious subject into the story? For example, what are the environmental consequences of what the military is doing to the ocean? There are so many things that are real about undersea science that we could use in the film. That’s what will make it special, to have things we’ve never seen before.”

Although Marvel often has cast and story approval on its films, Arad is viewed by studios as a collaborator, not an obstructionist. When “Spider-Man” was filming, he came to dailies every day. “We always wanted to hear Avi’s opinion,” says Ziskin. “Sometimes he’d have 90 good ideas and you’d end up focusing on five of them, and Avi would say, ‘OK, I’ll use the rest for another movie.’ ”

On some issues, Arad is adamant. When an early “Spider-Man” script had its hero slashing someone’s throat, Arad protested: “That would be the end of everything. Spider-Man kills nobody!”

As a toy inventor, Arad gauged success by his ability to catch a cultural wave. So he’s a firm believer in having his superheroes reflect the tastes of young moviegoers. “You don’t protect the franchise by saying the Hulk has to be like he was in the ‘60s,” he says. “Time moves on, and we had better move with it. In ‘Spider-Man,’ we do things that are different from the comic books. But whenever we had a debate about a story point, we’d always say, would it work for today?”

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“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.