Stan Lee Media sues Disney for $5.5 Billion

Alan Gardner Published: October 10, 2012 1 minute 4 comments

Comic Book Resources’s Robot 6 has a good write-up about the latest legal drama surrounding Stan Lee Media who has now sued Disney for $5.5 billion as well as the history of the company’s legal battles.

The complaint, filed in federal court in Colorado and first reported by Deadline, has its roots in Marvel’s 1998 bankruptcy, when CEO Isaac Perlmutter ended the $1 million-a-year lifetime contract with Stan Lee, negating the legendary writer’s assignment to the company of his rights to his co-creations. It also freed Lee to form Stan Lee Entertainment, which later merged with Stan Lee Media, with infamous entrepreneur Peter F. Paul. That company in turned filed for bankruptcy in February 2001; just four months after SLM emerged from protection in November 2006, shareholders filed a $5 billion lawsuit against Marvel. Stan Lee Media has had no connection to its co-founder and namesake in more than a decade; in fact, the two have sued each other on a few occasions.

Comments ⁴

Pete McDonnell

Weird that Stan Lee has no connection to Stan Lee Media. How’d you like to be sued by a company that uses your name as it’s corporate identity? I could see that being kind of a pain in the a$$!

Darryl Heine

What about Stan Lee’s Mighty 7 deal with Archie comics?

David Lane

@Pete It’s not weird. He used to have a connection but it ended.

Gerry Mooney

Back a few years when I was thinking about incorporating, I was told “Don’t use your own name to name the corporation with. It will just lead to problems!”

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