Since Marvel Studios decided to start making their own movies some years back without the help of studio backers, things have gone pretty well for them. Every single movie they have made has managed to earn over $250 million at the global box-office, and it was arguably their early success that spurred the Walt Disney Company to buy out Marvel three years back. The gambit paid off in spectacular fashion last year when The Avengers became a box-office phenomenon, grossing $1.5 billion at the global box-office.
This year, they're following though on that success in pretty convincing fashion, with Iron Man 3 being the year's top-grossing film so far (and the top grossing in the Iron Man series) with a $1.2 billion global gross, and Thor: The Dark World arguably poised to exceed the performance of its predecessor.
Next year, though, seems to be a relatively low-key year for the Disney-owned Marvel studios in the run-up the 2015 sequel to The Avengers; in April 2014 they'll be releasing the sequel Captain America: The Winter Soldier, before the U.S. summer movie season where they probably hope to make Fast and Furious money, and in August 2014 or basically the "winding down" month of the summer season they'll be releasing The Guardians of the Galaxy, or their first non-sequel in several years.
In short, for the first time since 2009, when they didn't release any films, Marvel will be stepping off the scorching summer battlefield and leave two different protagonists to slug it out with movies made from their characters: Sony Pictures, who will release The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Twentieth Century Fox, who will be releasing X-Men: Days of Future Past, which marks original X-Men director Bryan Singer's return to the mutants that made him a household name. Both films will be released in May of next year, within three weeks of each other, and this will mark the first time since both franchises were launched, X-Men in 2000 and Spider-Man in 2002, that they will have movies in the same year.
I'm genuinely interested to see how this showdown will play out. Personally I'm more partial to Spidey and am quite fond of the first two films in the series. I also welcomed last year's series reboot, which brought mechanical webshooters and a better lead actor to the screen. I am also a fan, however, of Michael Fassender's and James McAvoy's take on the younger Magneto and Professor X, and of the whole period feel of X-Men: First Class. I am also quite fond of Ellen Page, who starred in the often-reviled X-Men: Last Stand before her breakout role in Juno, and am anxious to see her play X-Men mainstay Kitty Pryde in a decent X-Men film for a change.
What's more interesting, though, is the fact that Fox and Sony are the only two studios left holding rights to Marvel characters outside of Disney. Their contracts allow them to continue to hold the rights to these characters for as long as they keep making movies based on them. To be able to continue making these movies, the movies they make have to make money. By effectively going head-to-head by releasing their movies within weeks of each other, they are jeopardizing that proposition because each of the films may well cannibalize off the other's grosses given the proximity, though to be fair Sony had staked its first weekend of May slot long before Fox decided to bump their X-Men flick up to the Memorial Day weekend.
Spider-Man will probably come out on top, considering that the first weekend of May is prime box-office real estate these days, and considering that last year's reboot, which "everyone" supposedly hated, still grossed $750 million at the global box-office, which is something like $250 million more than any X-Men movie since the beginning has made at the global box-office, but for my part, I want both movies to do well, and I sincerely hope they do.
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