In 1998, Marvel offered Sony all of its heroes + villains for $25m. Sony said it *only* wanted Spider-Man (and paid $10m for it)
While “No Way Home” is the first pandemic-era film to make $1B, the other Marvel films grossed $13B+ for Disney.
LESSON: Always take the first offer.
For other timeless business lessons, check out my Saturday email: trungphan.substack.com
Here is more background on the Spider Man deal from WSJ:
Notes:
◻️The $13B+ is prob closer to $20B (WSJ article from 2018)
◻️ Tom Holland Spider-Man series (Homecoming, Far From Home, No Way Home) co-produced by Disney-owned Marvel Studios and Sony-owned Columbia Pictures (w/ Sony handling distribution)
Went down a rabbit hole looking for cross-industry innovations (AKA one industry borrowing from another). Found some gems.
Here are 10 of them 🧵
James Dyson created the Dyson vacuum design after seeing how sawmills use cyclone force to eject sawdust.
The OG example: Henry Ford's car assembly line borrowed innovations from 3 industries:
◻️ Watch (interchangeable parts)
◻️ Canning (continuous flow manufacturing)
◻️ Meatpacking (Ford reversed the "disassembly" part of the meatpacking process - AKA chopping up cows)
Our intuitions often leads us astray. A good reminder: study counterintuitive math and economic results.
Here are 9 of them 🧵
The Birthday Paradox
In a room of 23 people, there's a >50% chance that 2 people share the same birthday.
This type of probabilistic thinking does *not* come naturally to many people.
The Coastline Paradox
Fractal geometry is also confounding:
The coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined measurement. As the unit of measurement gets smaller (eg. from KMs to cm), the length increases without limit.
But now, Amazon’s ad business is huge: it’s on a $30B+ annual run rate (more than 2x the combined sales of Twitter, Snap and Pinterest).
Here’s how it happened 🧵
1/ Amazon doesn’t break out its ad business separately in financial filings. However, most analyst believe ads make up the majority of its “Other” revenue segment.
This figure has exploded from $1B in 2015 to a current annual run rate of ~$32B.
2/ In 2009, Bezos said “ads are the price you pay for a crappy product”.
But the business is so lucrative that Amazon’s interface has been swamped with ads:
◻️ First 3-7 search results (left in red)
◻️ Most of the product page (right in blue)