Marvel, once a company only known to children and comic book fans, is now an absolute powerhouse. While ten years ago nobody even had a vague idea about who Iron Man was, today he’s the face of the company, with millions of people around the world knowing Tony Stark by name and being familiar with his backstory and talents. The Avengers – once a pale imitation of the much more popular Justice League – have now left Batman and Superman’s team in the dust with not one, but two movies which made over a billion dollars in the box office, with two more set to come out before the decade’s even over. Hell, speaking of box office success, a movie about Captain America, of all people (a character whose live action portrayals have been failed time and time and time again) also made over a billion dollars. What does that even say about the popularity of the Marvel universe and its heroes?
But with every successful franchise, there must also come tons of merchandising. We saw it time and time again – “Star Wars”, Frozen”, “Cars” and more have sold literally billions in toys, colouring books and other trinkets with the faces of the characters (and I’m sure it’s no coincidence that all of those franchises, just like Marvel, are owned by Disney). Naturally, Marvel had to follow suit, which is why we’ve got this slew of toys, masks, mobile games and animated shows featuring the Guardians of the Galaxy everywhere, but in addition to that, Marvel also decided to extend their merchandising to the unlikeliest of places – online gambling! Indeed, over the years several licensing deals were made which would allow Marvel characters to grace the faces of physical and online slot machines. Playtech was responsible for bringing those slots to Europe (and did so extremely successful, considering that The Avengers became one of the highest-grossing slots of all time), while Cryptologic was in charge of making the American versions.
Sadly, the last slot either company released came out in 2013, and we haven’t really seen any more despite the fact that several movies came out which would be prime candidates for a slot adaptation, such as the aforementioned “Guardians of the Galaxy”, “Ant-Man” or “Civil War”. As someone who actually got into the slot game relatively late, this has always bothered me, so I decided to do some research on my own to try and find out exactly why there’s no more Marvel slots. And, surprisingly, we have Disney to thank for that. The company has always had a very strong anti-gambling stance, to the point where they actively opposed legalizing gambling in Florida (for those of you who don’t know, Disneyworld, their biggest theme park, is located in Orlando, Florida). As a result, any gambling deals made before Marvel was bought by Disney were simply allowed to expire without being renewed. The same fate befell “Star Wars”, which apparently also had a couple of slots with its theme before Disney bought Lucasfilm.
So yeah, there wasn’t a big drama or a conspiracy, it was all because Disney likes to maintain a family-friendly image and sees gambling as an obstacle to that. It’s a bit anti-climactic, when all is said and done, but honestly, that’s just par for the course when it comes to the functioning of big corporations. Now that Disney owns Marvel, they are perfectly within their right to make these kinds of decisions, even if the little guys suffer for them. Thankfully, Playtech recently managed to make a new deal with Warner Bros. which would allow them to make slots based on DC movies, so at least we’re still going to be getting these high-quality slots that we know and love!