It’s been over 13 years since the Walt Disney Company made the surprise announcement that it had purchased Marvel Entertainment in a deal that would permanently transform both companies. At the time, Disney CEO Bob Iger said that “adding Marvel to Disney’s unique portfolio of brands provides significant opportunities for long-term growth and value creation,” which feels like quite the understatement from today’s point of view where four of the top 10 grossing movies of all time are Marvel movies.

The 2009 deal had been in the works for some time without it being leaked, including what were reportedly three months of solid negotiations before the deal was announced; the final deal was worth something in the region of $4 billion at the time — that would be in the region of $5.5 billion today — and it is, by any estimation, one of the smartest deals Disney has made in recent memory.

How good of a deal is it? Well, last year, Marvel had an estimated value of roughly $53 billion, so… yeah. I’d argue that a 1375% return on your investment, all things considered, counts as a pretty big win.

Disney’s Marvel Studios

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Marvel Studios plays perhaps the most significant role in establishing Marvel’s overall worth. The MCU is the most successful movie franchise of all time, with no less than four movies in the top 10 list of the highest grossing movies of all time. (Avengers: Endgame, Avengers: Infinity War, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and the first Avengers from 2012, if you’re curious.) Those four movies alone grossed $2,280,983,592 — and there are a further 26 movies to add onto that, bringing the total amount of money earned by the franchise in theaters somewhere north of $25 billion. It’s a staggering number, and yet even that undersells just how successful Marvel Studios actually is.

After all, that $25 billion (again, slightly more, but that’s a nice round number that we can work with) is only the box office gross of the MCU to date. It’s ignoring the money brought in by digital sales and rentals, or Blu-Rays and other forms of home release. It also ignores the value that Marvel brings to something like Disney+ both by the service acting as the exclusive streaming home for Marvel Studios’ back catalog, but also the only place to see the latest Marvel Studios show — which will end up being essential viewing for anyone wanting to keep up with the plot of the next movie, somehow.

Estimates suggest that, when combining the value of both box office and streaming revenue generated by Marvel Studios, you end up with a number in the region of $46 billion. Once again, that 2009 bet of $4 billion feels like a really, really good idea.

Disney’s Marvel Comics

Of course, there’s much more to Marvel than just a movie studio. It’s difficult to estimate just what Marvel’s comic book footprint is annually, especially now that the publisher is distributed in print entirely by Penguin Random House Publisher Services, which doesn’t release any sales estimate information publicly. Using information released by Diamond Comic Distributors from 2019 as a benchmark, however — with 2019 chosen because it’s the most recent year with a full year’s worth of Marvel orders to go by — then we can at least get a baseline. Follow along for the math.

In 2019, the direct market was worth $529.66 million, going by Diamond’s numbers. Marvel’s market share was 44.72%, meaning that Marvel alone was worth $236.86 million. Let’s assume that Marvel’s market share remained roughly the same in 2021, when the direct market generated $705 millions worth of sales, which would mean that last year, Marvel’s comic book output was worth somewhere in the region of $315.28 million, minus production, distribution, and creative costs for each issue. Not bad for something that has been referred to as a Research and Development department for Marvel’s more lucrative divisions.

Disney’s Marvel consumer products

While $315 million is nothing to be sneezed at from Marvel’s comic book arm, it’s a figure dwarfed by Marvel’s larger consumer products presence. In 2021, Disney’s collective consumer products haul (which includes the Walt Disney animated, Pixar, and Star Wars products in addition to Marvel’s) brought in a staggering $56.2 billion globally, up from $54 billion the year before.

While estimates vary wildly about just how much of that was generated specifically by Marvel, it’s commonly believed that Marvel is seen as the second most valuable brand inside the Disney empire behind only the classic Walt Disney animation characters. (When you consider the exclusive items locked into something like this year’s D23 Expo alone, that’s an entirely believable suggestion.) What this means is that we’re talking billions of dollars of profit generated by Marvel from consumer product sales alone — almost certainly earning back Disney’s initial spend on the company by itself each year.

Was Disney’s purchase of Marvel a good deal?

There’s even more of course — think of Marvel’s increasing presence in Disney’s theme parks and the money-making potential there, for example — but all of that almost seems almost unnecessary, in the face of it. The one constant in the past decade-plus of popular culture has been the increasing success of Marvel as a brand; in a world that’s constantly changing in almost every other respect, Marvel seems eternal and ever-present in its cultural dominance, with nothing seemingly changing that, whether it’s underwhelming movies (Hi, Eternals) or the rise of any kind of competition in the superhero space.

Whether or not that’s what the Walt Disney Company expected in 2009 when it first considered the idea of purchasing Marvel, or whether they — like everyone else at the time, I suspect — believed that it was a bubble that would eventually burst but have enough interesting concepts and characters in its back catalog to stick around in some form or another is neither here nor there. Even if Marvel’s cinematic fortunes had plunged in the aftermath of 2012’s The Avengers, Disney’s purchase would have been worth it. As things currently stand, however, the 2009 deal just might stand out as the smartest thing that Disney has done in decades.

Okay, so the Marvel deal obviously worked out, but what about Disney’s 2012 purchase of Lucasfilm?