Posted in: Comics, Comics Publishers, Current News, Ike Perlmutter, Marvel Comics | Tagged: tom brevoort, variety

Marvel SVP Responds To Responses To Variety's "Clickbait"

Earlier this week, Variety Magazine asked "Is Marvel In Trouble?". The answer is probably "no". But Marvel's Tom Brevoort had his own response

Clickbait is defined as "content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page." Which, to be fair could be every headline, cover, or advertisement ever. I've always seen it more as something that doesn't actually deliver what it promises. I hope that a good Bleeding Cool headline either delivers with what it promises or entertains you with the joke of not doing so.

Earlier this week, Variety Magazine put "Is Marvel In Trouble?" on its cover. The honest answer is probably "no", in that all aspects of Marvel are huge money-making machines, from publishing to merchandise to gaming to TV and movies, and anything that doesn't gets cut, and fast. Something that Ike Perlmutter insisted on when he was CEO and something that has remained – maybe more so now that no one has to pay his or his assistants' salaries. Some things may make more money than others, and some don't make as much money as they used to, but something continuing to exist at Marvel – not true for all of Disney- is proof that it's in the black.

Just the original Variety tweet alone has had five million views. Quote tweet responses included the following from some familiar names:

Patrick Willems: hold up…you're telling me that force feeding audiences "an endless torrent" of something eventually made them less excited about it?!?!

John DiLillo: bob iger has approached every single part of his career the same way he did "who wants to be a millionaire" back in 2000 — total overexposure, flooding the market until even fans are tired of something they used to enjoy

Gregg Katzman (PR at IDW): I know there's been A LOT of talk about this article, but I don't know if anyone has pointed out that in this 2k+ word article about "Marvel," the word "comic" is used a grand total of four times. Comics need to be part of the conversation about comic book adaptations.

Andy Diggle: Crushing deadlines negatively impacting the quality of the creative work? Impenetrably tangled continuity?MCU sounds like the comics industry…

Meghan O'Keefe:"Marvel was bleeding money, with a single episode of "She-Hulk" costing some $25 million, dwarfing the budget of a final-season episode of HBO's "Game of Thrones." There's a lot of YIKES in this article, but an episode of SHE-HULK cost that much?

AnthonyGramuglia:"Here's the thing about this article, though… …what did it really say that we didn't already know? We knew Blade was being rewritten a lot. We knew the special effects drama at Marvel. We knew just about everything they already said happened. The rest is "rumors."

Bryan Edward Hill:I feel like this is the kind of story they wrote 40% of eight years ago, and then they just wait to put it out when there's a lull in news. Superhero fatigue may indeed be real, even I feel it — but I hardly think a multiple billion dollar juggernaut is "in trouble."

And the artist of the cover, Rafa Alvarez, commented "Dream job alert!! I got to draw the cover for @variety magazine with some of my fav Marvel characters! Yes, they might be puzzled with the audience lukewarm reaction to the last films and series but as an MCU fan I am sure they still have one or two aces up their sleeves. Thanks a ton to @haleykluge for the trust and the art direction on this one! Swipe for some other loose sketches". I did, Rafa! I think the hammer one might have gotten some headlines of its own…

But there was no official Marvel response. Not would you expect one. What we did get today, however, was a personal response on his personal newsletter from the very personable person that is Tom Brevoort, Who also, apropos of nothing, happens to be the longest-standing employee at Marvel, since being hired as an intern in 1989, made Executive Editor in 2007, and additionally Senior Vice President of Publishing in 2011. Brevoort wrote;

"It's been funny this past week to see all of the mail that's started to come in through the typical Marvel e-mail addresses. Funny because none of it is about comic book publishing at all, but instead in response in one way or another to VARIETY's recent clickbait story concerning the status of Marvel Studios. And as you might expect, there is no shortage of people who are eager to tell the folks there how to fix it all. Of course, I might have more faith in whatever magical solutions they might have to offer (all of which inevitably break down to, "Make movies I would like!") if they were able to locate the proper addresses to send this stuff to. But then, I can only imagine how much similar correspondence the actual Studios people get if this is what arrives in my mailbox each morning. Rule One of showing that you're a competent professional: make sure that you're pitching to the right people."

I mean, I still get emails for one "Rich Johnson" in comics. And also, sometimes, for CBR.

"And all of that mail is really no different from the stuff we often get that's actually about our efforts. Typically, you can see when a couple of folks set up an effort to convince us of something by bombarding us with e-mails. Suddenly, for a day or two, in come bunches of communications, all of them checking off the same talking points, typically in the same sequence, all of them personalized to some degree but clearly the product of an organized effort originating somewhere. And all of which wind up sabotaging their premise that "everybody feels this way!" by making it apparent that their forces are all drafting from the same script at the same moment. A word in your ear about this sort of thing, it's good to express yourself and make an effort, but you should probably be slightly more clever than this if you want to be seen as representing the whole of the audience rather than just one small part of it."

I blame Chat GPT. It writes all the comic book protest e-mails the same way.

"I love the fans, and I love the ease and directness of communication that we can share. That's surely part of why I put so much effort into these stupid Newsletters every week. But it becomes difficult to take any of it seriously when the people with complaints are so utterly bad at expressing them. You don't need to convince everybody on Earth to join your crusade, just express your feelings clearly and directly and without being abusive, and that's all it really takes. I mean, I dislike Nick Lowe as much as the next person, but some of these efforts to disparage his efforts on AMAZING SPIDER-MAN by looking big are pretty embarrassing. You can do better than this."

To be honest, Nick Lowe is quite good at doing that himself. He is Teflon-coated Kevlar, a uniform he inherited from Steve Wacker, I think… and somehow I can't see this getting give million views, sadly.

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