Something actually went up on Wall Street: The market evidently liked what it heard in Marvel‘s quarterly report for the fourth quarter of 2008, with the stock closing up more than 15% to $27.55 after the earnings call.
Marvel’s third quarterly report had topped Wall Street estimates; so, too, did this one, with Reuters reporting that “profit more than doubled, beating market estimates for the sixth straight quarter, as it benefited from the strong performance of its first self-produced films.”
Marvel’s revenue more than doubled to $224.3 million, the report said, including film-production revenue of $135.5 million, principally from Iron Man DVDs. Publishing revenue grew 9% to $33.1 million: recall that Diamond sales for the market in the quarter were $114.89 million at full retail. Marvel’s portion of that, based on market shares, is about $42 million, so figuring roughly three-eights of that as the publisher’s revenue, the direct market accounts for somewhere around $15.75 million, or just over half of it. If foreign or some other kinds of receipts are in that publishing revenue total, that’d square up fairly well with the direct market/mass market breakdown posited here earlier.
The company said it still saw a steep drop in earnings and revenue for 2009, when it has fewer self-produced movies.
Comichron founder John Jackson Miller has tracked the comics industry for more than 25 years, including a decade editing the industry’s retail trade magazine; he is the author of several guides to comics, as well as more than a hundred comic books for various franchises.
He is the author of novels including Star Wars: Kenobi, Star Wars: A New Dawn, Star Trek: Discovery – The Enterprise War, and his upcoming release, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – The High Country. Read more about them at his fiction site.
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