What I often hear from people who enjoy the films under the Marvel Studios banner–”Iron Man,” “Thor,” “The Incredible Hulk” and the upcoming “Avengers,” among others–is: Why it is that characters like Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, or the X-Men are being done by Sony and Twentieth Century Fox–who have shown a tendency to frak them up–instead of the studio that’s run by the people that actually had something to do with creating the characters and would be more likelier to respect their fans and stories?

Marvel, before they moved into motion pictures, were not always as successful as they are now, and as a result had to sell the rights of some of their most popular characters to bring in needed revenue.

This was, of course, before being purchased by Disney.

Before anyone critizes their decision, you have to keep in mind that if they didn’t manage to survive, not only would there be no movies done by Marvel, but the company could have potentially been taken over by another comic company.

Like DC, for instance.

ScreenRant three years ago published a listing of which studios owned which Marvel characters, which I am lucky that they decided to reprint and goes a long way toward explaining why “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” was such a mess (other than Gavin Hood directing, that is, because that film was screwed long before Hood came into the picture).