Marvel Ultimate Universe (2003-2009)

One mark of the end of the Bronze Age of Comic Books was the sale of Marvel Entertainment Group, first to the film company New World Entertainment in 1986 and then to Ronald Perelman's MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings company in 1989. Perelman spent the 1990s saddling Marvel with debt, leaving the company both bankrupt and impoverished in its holdings.

MEG's action figure partner Toy Biz bought it in 1998 and reviewed the best ways to leverage its new intellectual property into films and other media. To stop the bleeding, film deals were inked with various studios for the most desirable characters: Spider-Man. X-Men. Fantastic Four. All that were left were the losers no film company wanted: the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther, and other C-listers. The grim and gritty nineties had not been kind to traditional, heroic characters.

Brian Michael Bendis was tasked with re-imagining the Marvel Universe for the 21st century. As with Marvel's previous "New Universe" and "2099" projects, a new series of "Ultimate" books would take place in its own continuity, not the mainstream "Marvel 616." There would be Ultimate X-Men, Ultimate Iron Man, and so on. The current Avengers writer protested that a series called "Ultimate Avengers" would implicitly denigrate his own work as less than "ultimate," so in compromise the new Avengers series was simply titled, "The Ultimates," which told a single story twelve issues long.

Toy Biz set about making high-budget action movies based on the Ultimates characters, starting with Iron Man. They daringly put up all their new intellectual property as collateral for the loans, meaning that if the Iron Man film flopped, Marvel would once again have a new owner. But the movie succeeded beyond all expectations, setting the stage for another thirty films, a dozen television programs, and the $4 billion sale of MEG to Disney in 2009.