How soon can Marvel’s film division take advantage of having Disney’s marketing and publicity support?
When it comes to pitching and promoting its characters and brand name, no media company can hold a Tinker Bell to the House That Walt Built. But when the time does come for them to start marketing Marvel, it won’t be a slam-dunk. The same pitch that works for “High School Musical” won’t work for “Luke Cage Noir.” We’re talking an entirely new set of promotional skills. Every Wall Street analyst quoted on the Disney/Marvel deal keeps citing the fact that Disney needed this deal to reconnect with young, impressionable boys that the company has lost step with in recent years. That makes perfect sense, except for the fact that the comics buying crowd skews older and older each year and Marvel, like every other comics publisher, has struggled to attract new young male readers for years. Finding a way to reverse that trend, which is actually more of an unfortunate fact of life in the comics world, could be the biggest challenge of the entire deal. A more immediate problem is that it will be
