Paramount Wants Marvel To Churn Out A Million Films Forever.

And because Marvel has been so brilliant at churning out one successful movie that everybody likes and one mediocre movie that everyone instantly forgets about a nanosecond after leaving the cinema, that can only mean one thing. More Marvel movies!

Paramount has just signed a deal to globally release the next five Marvel films. Since that includes Thor and Captain America, Paramount probably thinks it’s got a pretty sweet deal going on. But it should have read the contract in more detail - the other three movies are about Dazzler, 8-Ball and an utterly pointless shot-for-shot remake of Daredevil, this time with all the characters played by Ben Affleck. Eat it, Paramount!

We’re just starting to see how successful Marvel is at making its own movies. Back when Marvel announced its movie production business in 2005, we weren’t alone in fearing thousands of low-quality direct-to-DVD standard movies about all the superheroes nobody cares about. But Marvel has proved us wrong.

Look at Iron Man - by cherry-picking some of the world’s best actors, letting them operate under one of the world’s most admired indie directors and giving them hundreds of millions of dollars to blow shit up with, Iron Man was always going to be a guaranteed smash. And then there was The Incredible Hulk, which was, um. Yeah.

But the Marvel formula has been set - which is why Kenneth Branagh might be directing Thor next - and it mostly works very well. Which is why Paramount has just decided to globally distribute all the films that Marvel can possibly push out. Reuters reports:

Marvel Entertainment Inc raised its film unit’s 2008 revenue outlook following initial payments of $60 million from Viacom’s Paramount Pictures — the distributor of the comic book publisher’s “Iron Man” movie. Paramount will also distribute Marvel’s next five self-produced feature films across the world, the two companies said in a separate statement.

And it’s probably a wise investment on Paramount’s part, because Marvel seems to be so hell-bent on putting a movie about The Avengers together that it’ll keep throwing out huge new movies based on its individual members - and the inevitable sequels - until it gets there.

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