OMD Claim Verification

[Alan2099]

They bank on the name to attract people to Homecoming knowing her popularity

Nobody knew there was even a "MJ" in the movie until the last couple of minutes. That was not something they used to draw people into the movie. They flshed out her character fine, but she still wasn't MJ. She wasn't even a love interest. She wasn't an aspiring actress. She didn't have red hair.

The ONLY thing that ties her to Mary Jane was the fact that she knew Peter Parker and she has the same initials. By that argument, Lex Luthor and Lois Lane are the same character.

[Mister Mets]

Nobody knew there was even a "MJ" in the movie until the last couple of minutes. That was not something they used to draw people into the movie. They flshed out her character fine, but she still wasn't MJ. She wasn't even a love interest. She wasn't an aspiring actress. She didn't have red hair.

The ONLY thing that ties her to Mary Jane was the fact that she knew Peter Parker and she has the same initials. By that argument, Lex Luthor and Lois Lane are the same character.

Man of Tomorrow, a Pedro Almodovar's Superman film.

[bob.schoonover]

So, would it be safe to say that sales went UP after One More Day, comparatively speaking?

I would say it would be about even. If you take the 3 months between The Other and Civil War proper* (ASM had Road to CW on their banner, but sales spiked higher the following month when CW 1 came out), the three SM books accounted for between 2.9% and 3.1% of total Top 300 sales**: 100% *(ASM + Sensational + FNSM)/(Top 300 Total). When sales settled down on BND (May 2008, for example), it's 3.2%. It's worth noting ASM + SSM this February were also right under 3.2%, which may or may not suggest to someone that SM will always float around 3% of the market. I would not call this an entirely rigorous methodology, of course***, but it's sufficiently transparent and probably gets at the meat of the issue (and is, of course, consistent w/Mr Slott's comments above).


*It's hard to pick a "control" data set for SM sales before OMD - You have (in reverse chronology) OMD, Back in Black, and Civil War, a little gap, The Other, and before that FNSM didn't exist (MK SM did, but it was tailing off).

**Dividing by total sales of the Top 300 gives a rough idea of the strength of the market, but one should feel free to quibble with the idea that that is the best way to normalize monthly sales

***It ignores, for example, digital and TPB sales. Also, while I tried to find months when there was no anniversary issue (or event tie-in, etc.), I won't claim for sure none of those months were anomalous for some other reason (e.g. a book shipped late and I didn't grab the additional sales from the following month).

[Tuck]

Bollocks.

MJ was going to be in Amazing Spider-Man 2. They filmed scenes with her. They cut her out to focus on Peter and Gwen's story more so that Gwen's death in the movie had more impact.

I wouldn't use the word "focus" to describe anything about ASM 2.

[Kevinroc]

Nobody knew there was even a "MJ" in the movie until the last couple of minutes. That was not something they used to draw people into the movie. They flshed out her character fine, but she still wasn't MJ. She wasn't even a love interest. She wasn't an aspiring actress. She didn't have red hair.

The ONLY thing that ties her to Mary Jane was the fact that she knew Peter Parker and she has the same initials. By that argument, Lex Luthor and Lois Lane are the same character.

Honestly, that cutesy little wink and nod is more comparable to "Robin" in The Dark Knight Rises than anything else. The entire "MJ" reveal completely relies on the audience knowing who that character is and why the "MJ" moniker is important in a Spider-Man story.

(It's like they were too nervous to say they cast a black actress as Mary Jane.)

[Alan2099]

Honestly, that cutesy little wink and nod is more comparable to "Robin" in The Dark Knight Rises than anything else. The entire "MJ" reveal completely relies on the audience knowing who that character is and why the "MJ" moniker is important in a Spider-Man story.

I can give you that. It was a cute little nod.

(It's like they were too nervous to say they cast a black actress as Mary Jane.)

... I didn't know she was black. I thought she was maybe Hispanic or something.

[Celgress]

... I didn't know she was black. I thought she was maybe Hispanic or something.

That's a valid point. I also only knew she was African American because of being familiar with Zendaya's ethnic makeup. She does look Hispanic at times.

PS I was rather disappointed they did not have Zendaya's character be straight up MJ. I think her portrayal of Michelle would have made for a great modernized version of the character.

[Kevinroc]

... I didn't know she was black. I thought she was maybe Hispanic or something.

She's biracial. Her father is black and her mother is white.

[Frontier]

Neither of those statements suggest Disney/Sony see Mary Jane Watson as a popular draw for a movie, which is relatively germane to whether they, as a corporation, care about OMD

All in all it seems like there's a really hot-and-cold approach when it comes to Mary Jane.

Sometimes it seems like they want to acknowledge or nod to her importance to the mythos, other times it seems like they want absolutely nothing to do with her, which I guess makes sense since her role in the franchise is kind of "problematic" as far the version of Spider-Man Marvel usually wants to promote.

None of this seems to effect how hard they promote Gwen, but she's probably seen as "safer" to use then Mary Jane for a variety of reasons.

[Inversed]

You can't say that Marvel doesn't consider MJ some kind of a draw, when they put her on as many variant covers (alot by J. Scott Campbell) as they possibly can. Because they do sell, and funnily enough, I believe one of the best selling Go Down Swinging variants, was the second printing variant for 797 with the image of them making out.

[WebLurker]

Since we don't have the entire sales data available and there are too many variables, I don't think we can accurately say whether OMD helped or hindered the franchise in the long run. However, I think a good case can be made that had OMD never happened, the series would've stabilized on it's own. The fact is that Spider-Man sells (a few years ago, they crunched the numbers and it turned out the be the most valuable superhero franchise in existence, suffering no rivals) and it is Marvel's most beloved character, once again with no rivals.

(Conversely, I don't think that bringing the marriage back would raise sales either, for the same reasons.)

[Mister Mets]

There were so many sales arguments after OMD, and a lot of it seemed to be based on a desire by people who preferred the marriage to try to prove that One More Day hurt the books, which often led to them making some bad arguments. I don't know the extent to which they were arguing in bad faith (saying things they knew to be untrue) and how much of it was human nature; it is easier to believe something that supports your position than something that does not. The sales discussions were more about proving a point than about having honest open-ended discussions.

As examples of dishonest claims, OMD critics compared the monthly ASM under JMS to the thrice-monthly title without considering the obvious fact that from Marvel's perspective it could be worth a loss of some readers to increase the total number of copies sold.
The benchmark for JMS' book seemed to be when the title was mired in events, which artifically boosted sales. The honest comparison would have been Amazing Spider-Man #524, the last issue prior to "The Other" crossover (which was followed by ten issues of Civil War tie-ins, Back in Black, and One More Day.)
They looked at raw sales data for one title rather than what was going on in the industry, as if there were otherwise be no impact on sales for Amazing Spider-Man if the tenth best selling book of the month sold 80,000 copies when #10 was good enough for 110,000 copies a few years earlier.
There seemed to be the belief that what the norm is for books to stay on the same level forever, when that's not how the industry works. Other books declined in sales, but Amazing Spider-Man was seen as the outlier.
There seemed to be the belief that sales data is clear and unambiguous when this is often not the case. We can tell when something is a massive hit (Superior Spider-Man, Tom King's Batman) or when it's a massive flop (Mosaic) but there's a lot of room in between.

No one wants to admit that the information we have is typically too limited to come to any conclusion, and that it's hard to consider counterfactuals (we have no idea how Amazing Spider-Man would have sold in a world where Quesada left Marvel prior to implementing One More Day, since those sales would be based on completely new storytelling and hiring decisions.)

[Dan Slott]

There was a guy running around for the duration of BND, who would make charts showing the Civil War bumped (pre-OMD) issues... and then he'd do something a little unethical. He would make an "average" of the "total" sales for ASM during the BND months and chart those in comparison to prove ASM was worse off after OMD. The numbers seemed really off. So we checked the math and confronted the guy about it. Turns out the program he was using had a limit to how many variables you could punch in (this was his excuse), so he could only average TWO of the THREE issues of BND/ASM for any one month. So which TWO sets of numbers did he use? THE LOWEST SELLING ones. He was purposefully chucking out the best data to make his "case". These charts were getting GREAT play over at the crawlspace, in places like 4Chan, facebook, and so on. And they'd pop up here at CBR too. Once he got caught, he had a million excuses for why chucking out the highest sales numbers made his charts more "accurate".

When people ask me when/why I started keeping detailed files about ASM sales-- and why I'd debate the sales figures so much-- it was because of that idiot.

[Celgress]

There was a guy running around for the duration of BND, who would make charts showing the Civil War bumped (pre-OMD) issues... and then he'd do something a little unethical. He would make an "average" of the "total" sales for ASM during the BND months and chart those in comparison to prove ASM was worse off after OMD....

Thanks again for more info.

I have a question, Mr. Slott. I understand if you can't comment, but I am curious. Do you know why the decision was made to have Zendaya play an original character in Homecoming rather than an updated version of Mary Jane? Her character even had the same initials and in other ways seemed rather similar to a young MJ, so naturally, I've wondered why the choice was made since the release of the movie.

[Miles To Go]

Do you know of any other creators that do book-keeping on sales?