Originally Posted by
BobbysWorld
Its also extremely relevant that Marvel Comics is just one branch of a giant multi-media conglomerate. Its profits are negligible compared to the value corporate higher-ups see in it being simply an IP farm, meant to seed, cultivate and test various ideas or directions that they can implement in merchandising, TV and film, which is where the 'real money' is made in corporate eyes.
They can afford to take a loss on literally any comic at any time, if they feel it serves a purpose, and barely even notice a dint in their overall bottom line. Like there are a lot of seemingly inexplicable choices both Marvel and DC have made with their comics in the last ten years, cancelling seemingly REALLY successful runs and letting books that barely break even go on seemingly forever.....because its not really about what the comic sales bring in for Warner Brothers and Disney.....its about what TV/film ideas they're trying out, setting up for, running consumer experiments with, etc. Even the top sellers in comics month to month are still only a drop in the bucket of overall profits for the larger company - that's not really the source of their value to Marvel and Disney at this point.
*Shrugs* Which sucks because it leads to some truly horrible creative decisions for the comics at times, like I know its often said that no more mutants was about pettiness over the film rights and/or because Quesada said making any new character a mutant was just making writers lazy.....but that was always bullshit because post M-Day the comics immediately pivoted to introducing scores of new characters with stuff like Avengers Initiative whose oh so creative origins were often just 'there was a generic never explained experiment somewhere probably' and then again with the push to Inhumans.....basically writers were encouraged to make new characters like Miss Marvel, Quake, Flint, Inferno, Reader, etc, that they then introduced in shows like Agents of SHIELD or their Secret Warriors cartoon....the no more mutants thing was ALWAYS about the fact that Fox didn't just own the X-Men film rights, they owned the entire concept of mutants and thus even NEW mutant characters created AFTER the initial Fox film deal still fell under the Fox umbrella rather than the MCU's. Hence why X-Men First Class was able to use characters like Darwin and Angel Salvatore even though both were created well after the film rights were sold. So it was never about not even wanting Fox to have more characters to use, it was simply about Marvel not seeing any potential profit to be made in new characters they (at the time) didn't think they'd ever be able to shift over into other media. (Like, just a slight shift in how that tends to be talked about on social media, but it is key - it wasn't "we don't want to give our media rivals more fodder" so much as "why would we make characters that only they can use and we can't").
So I mean, in as much as sales figures are no longer the accurate predictors for whether a title will sink or swim that they once were, I think its worth noting that this isn't JUST because its hard to put a finger on just what the true sales figures ARE anymore given things like the pandemic and digital vs print sales....but its also just as much because what the corporate overlords even WANT to result from putting out various comics has shifted so seismically its no longer as simple as just 'they want comics to sell and cancel the ones that don't.' There's just a ton more variables these days that we don't have a real barometer for, from a consumer perspective.