Reclusive Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter Photographed in Public at Trump Event

[Pinsir]

You got to admit, he is a tactical genius. He allows the print portion of his company to placate SJW-types (i.e. the part of the company that doesn't matter) and then uses the movie side (i.e. what matters) to funnel regressive, cultural bankrupt flicks as their SJW fans cry, "We will finally get our Captain Marvel movie in 2027!" Well played, Perlmutter!

[Lucas 35]

From Marvel: The Untold Story

But the company was still broke, surviving on a $ 200 million bridge loan that would have to be paid back soon. Perlmutter’s first order of business was to terminate the expensive contracts with executives that dragged on the company’s finances. Stan Lee wasn’t worried when he heard the news. His $ 500,000 per year lifetime deal was a special case— after all, he was the face of Marvel Comics. Nor did he worry when Perlmutter summoned him to New York. “Ike greeted me like a long-lost brother,” Lee recalled, “telling me how important I was to him and the company and assuring me that I’d be making more money than ever from now on. I thought to myself, Gee, why did people tell me he’s such a cold fish?” Then Perlmutter presented him with a two-year contract at half his previous salary. Lee was astonished. After the royal treatment by Bill Bevins, he thought, this was like Martin Goodman all over again.

But Perlmutter had underestimated just what Stan Lee’s loyalty meant to the company. Lee’s lawyer began negotiating. Without a contract, Lee might contest the ownership of some of those characters for which Marvel had, on innumerable occasions over three decades, credited him as the creator. And even if Lee didn’t have much of a case, the damage to Marvel’s public image would be devastating. The two parties eventually settled on a salary raise to $ 810,000 (with generous annual increases), plus a $ 500,000 yearly pension for his wife, plus $ 125,000 for writing the Spider-Man comic strip, and a whopping 10 percent of any movie and television profits that Marvel enjoyed. Furthermore, the new contract was nonexclusive, which meant that Lee could supplement his income in other ways— in fact, by the time he re-signed with Marvel, he’d already lined up an Internet start-up called Stan Lee Media.

While Lee’s lawyer played hardball, Perlmutter saved money by sacking executives. He removed Joe Calamari (who only a year earlier had personally fired Avi Arad), Shirrel Rhoades, and a half dozen others. Then he rehired former president Jerry Calabrese to put editors out on the street. In a matter of weeks, most of the staff was gone; the number of editors was reduced from thirty to six. More titles were canceled. Every Friday, members of the dwindling staff wondered which side of the going-away parties they’d be on.* Once fired, an employee was told to leave his personal belongings in a box for inspection and leave the building. If the box contained comic books on which the employee had worked, they would be removed— they were company property, Perlmutter insisted.

Speculation that Marvel would soon simply hire its competitors to produce its line of comics, entirely eliminating the need for an editorial staff, ran rampant. Smoked-glass conference room doors, etched with Spider-Man logos, had been special-ordered five years ago, at the height of success; now they were among the items the company auctioned off and shipped away.

The joke everyone muttered was that, if Ike Perlmutter had his way, Marvel would consist of one guy in an office with a phone, licensing the characters. Why waste money on anything else? Memos demanded that paper clips not be thrown away, that lights be turned off if an office was vacated for more than five minutes. “Ike was an absolute tyrant, plain and simple,” said one longtime employee. “There was no negotiation, there was no meeting of the minds, If Ike said, ‘Turn the computers off at 5 pm,’ you turned the computers off at 5 pm. If you crossed Ike, you were gone.” (Fueling the fear was the rumor that the Six-Day War veteran still carried a pistol on his ankle.) After the coffee machine and bottles of water were removed from the Bullpen, word got around that Perlmutter was pushing for a policy of urinalysis for all employees. President Jerry Calabrese, for one, couldn’t take it. “After only a little less than two months,” he wrote in November, “it’s clear to me that it would be impossible for me to make the kind of positive impact and difference I believed possible when I accepted the task.”

Meanwhile, Perlmutter had begun to suspect that his longtime Toy Biz ally Joseph Ahearn, who was now chief executive at Marvel, was about to make a bid for power. Against the advice of his inner circle, Perlmutter called for Ahearn’s ouster. Eric Ellenbogen, formerly of Lorne Michaels’s Broadway Video, was announced as the replacement. In his first days on the new job, Ellenbogen suggested that a Christmas party would help the Marvel staff’s morale.

No, said Perlmutter. That was a waste of twelve hundred dollars.

Weeks later, a number of freelancers began receiving letters claiming overpayment and demanding that money be returned to the company. Steve Gerber opened his mail to find a bill for fifty-three dollars.

To the outside eye, it may have seemed that Bill Jemas had a free hand to do whatever he liked— but that would be discounting Ike Perlmutter and Avi Arad. Perlmutter was the most hands-on owner Marvel ever had, as the employees were reminded repeatedly. A conference-calling executive might be interrupted from his negotiations by an angry Perlmutter, waving a thirty-dollar invoice in his face, asking why so much money was being spent. “He used to wander the hallways and stand in your doorway,” recalled one editor, “and stare at you until you got uncomfortable and then he’d leave. He always had a notebook in his hand, like he was writing notes about you.” Once, when Perlmutter heard that some employees were involved in a Fantasy Football league, the staff returned from a meeting to find all computers confiscated. Social, frivolous lunchtime activities— a half hour of watching television, or playing Dungeons & Dragons— were banned from the offices.

For a while, Jemas held sway with the Israeli boss, even bypassing the CEO in the chain of command. “Bill reported to Peter Cuneo,” recalled one observer, “but it was just a façade for the investors. Bill really reported to Ike. They screamed at each other, but Ike listened to him for some reason. ‘He’s smart,’ Ike would say to me, maybe because he stood up to him.”

By the summer of 2000, Lee would have certainly enjoyed putting Marvel in its place. “I was very surprised that Stan Lee was, on the inside, considered to be an outsider,” recalled a Marvel executive. “Somebody to take care of— somebody we’ve gotta pay attention to.” The “Stan’s Soapbox” column, a regular feature since 1967, was discontinued; Marvel explained that it took up potentially valuable advertising space. Perlmutter had also been campaigning to remove the “Stan Lee Presents” banner from the comics, and had even insisted that Lee be scratched from the list of those who received complimentary copies of new comics. “Ike had it in for Stan like you wouldn’t believe,” said one editor. “Ike hated him.”

[Lucas 35]

And other stories about it:

“Disney ran out of food at an Avengers media event because of Perlmutter's constraints, causing reporters to pilfer from Universal’s nearby suite for The Five-Year Engagement”

Perlmutter—who has a background in the toy business—was specifically responsible for the controversial decision to take a gendered approach to Avengers merchandise. In short, the blame is falling on him for the conspicuous absence of Black Widow-related toys.

He'd refused to allow female-protagonist focused movies and was greatly against minority ones. Feige gets his female-protagonist superhero movie that Perlmutter didn't want to happen and Perlmutter got his Inhumans passion project which Feige didn't want to make. His stance, having gotten his start in the toy industry, was that female action figures don't sell so the movies had to take toy sales into account. To that end, he forced them to use turn the original villain of IM3 (a woman) into a man which is how we ended up with Aldritch Killian.

Perlmutter is also the reason they don't have F4 back yet. Fox had an insanely high asking price for F4 rights to return which Disney was OK with paying because "more money than God," but Perlmutter wouldn't let them take the deal because "it's a waste of money, the rights will just return on their own anyways."

[BrianWilly]

Yuuck. I'd been dubious about a lot of Perlmutter's bad press, but rubbing elbows with the likes of Trump seems to confirm them all.

Sad!

[beetee]

2016 ain't over yet. 2016 owes us.

[Valamist]

Ugh... this is depressing. A as a proud liberal lefty, its a shame to see a franchise/company I love run by someone who seems to have some very sicking views. I just have my fingers crossed that his, or the growing alt right element in America, dose not start entering or tainting the comics side of Marvel. Still, it warms my heart reading the works/twitter of the people writing the comics. So long as they have writers like Nick Spencer, G Willow Wilson, Ryan North, Dan Slott etc and heroes like Kamala, She-Hulk, Squirrel Girl who stand up for decency and real heroic values, then I will still call Marvel my home.

[gurkle]

This reminds me a bit of an interview a left-wing magazine did some years back with The Simpsons creator Matt Groening, asking him how he could reconcile his left-wing politics with working for Rupert Murdoch. He didn't have a great answer as I recall.

But it's not like there is some pure and good pop-culture company out there for liberals to work for. (Or conservatives for that matter.) It's just a way of reminding ourselves that giving money to corporate brands we're probably giving money to some cause we don't like.

[Digifiend]

Most people who work at Marvel hate the guy, there are several stories about him in Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. It's also no secret that most top-level Disney and Marvel can not stand the guy and are counting the days until he's gone. Kevin Feige struggled to get him out of Marvel Studios lead for one reason: he was tired of having to deal with him.

I don't get it. Surely someone has the power to hand him a pink slip and quote Donald Trump's Apprentice catchphrase?

[Coin Biter]

You got to admit, he is a tactical genius. He allows the print portion of his company to placate SJW-types (i.e. the part of the company that doesn't matter) and then uses the movie side (i.e. what matters) to funnel regressive, cultural bankrupt flicks as their SJW fans cry, "We will finally get our Captain Marvel movie in 2027!" Well played, Perlmutter!

An... interesting post. However, Perlmutter has ceased to oversee Marvel Studios (i.e., the films) since September 2015.

[Crimz]

And other stories about it:

“Disney ran out of food at an Avengers media event because of Perlmutter's constraints, causing reporters to pilfer from Universal’s nearby suite for The Five-Year Engagement”

Perlmutter—who has a background in the toy business—was specifically responsible for the controversial decision to take a gendered approach to Avengers merchandise. In short, the blame is falling on him for the conspicuous absence of Black Widow-related toys.

He'd refused to allow female-protagonist focused movies and was greatly against minority ones. Feige gets his female-protagonist superhero movie that Perlmutter didn't want to happen and Perlmutter got his Inhumans passion project which Feige didn't want to make. His stance, having gotten his start in the toy industry, was that female action figures don't sell so the movies had to take toy sales into account. To that end, he forced them to use turn the original villain of IM3 (a woman) into a man which is how we ended up with Aldritch Killian.

Perlmutter is also the reason they don't have F4 back yet. Fox had an insanely high asking price for F4 rights to return which Disney was OK with paying because "more money than God," but Perlmutter wouldn't let them take the deal because "it's a waste of money, the rights will just return on their own anyways."

[MindofShadow]

im not going to pretend to know the history here

but

being incredibly cheap and frugal when your company is basically bankrupt...


isn't that a... good thing?

[Username taken]

im not going to pretend to know the history here

but

being incredibly cheap and frugal when your company is basically bankrupt...


isn't that a... good thing?

My thoughts exactly.

I think he severely lacked in inter-personal skills (and is an overall creep) but his cost cutting tactics amongst other things apparently saved Marvel back then.

[responsarbre]

Political views aside, that picture is HAUNTING.

Looks like something out of Twin Peaks, right down to the wardrobe.

[MindofShadow]

My thoughts exactly.

I think he severely lacked in inter-personal skills (and is an overall creep) but his cost cutting tactics amongst other things apparently saved Marvel back then.

i mean, his racial/sexist stuff is cringeworthy if all the smoke is to be believed.

btu the business stuff... seeems... prudent?

[cranger]

Who you work for should not enter into politics. Period. I'm not going to quit my job just because I may find out that my CEO voted for Trump. What they're doing on their own time doesn't matter. It's a boycott that doesn't make sense but it's their right to do it. They just may not want to take any money from Trump votes I guess.

But apparently they are not only taking money from Trump votes, they are also making money for Trump votes.

Considering their whole stance is basically just 'punishing' their own fans who likely did not even vote for Trump anyway just because of where they happen to live, it certainly looks even more ridiculous when you compare that to their own financial interests.

(Note: in case some people did not catch it, some creators, Ramos being one of them, have said they will not attend conventions in Trump states)