Picture the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. Iron Man, the Avengers, Black Panther, twenty-odd years of the biggest film franchise on the planet. Now picture all of it owned by Michael Jackson. It very nearly happened. In the 1990s, the King of Pop made a genuine attempt to buy Marvel Comics outright, and his reason had almost nothing to do with business. He wanted to play Spider-Man.
The story is not fan rumor. It comes from Stan Lee himself, the man who co-created Spider-Man. Lee spoke about it publicly at San Diego Comic-Con in 2009 and confirmed it again in a 2012 interview. Jackson had approached him wanting to produce and star in the first Spider-Man film. Lee explained the obvious problem: he did not personally own the character, and Jackson would need Marvel’s permission. Jackson’s answer, according to Lee, was four words. “I will buy Marvel.”
Stan Lee: Jackson “wanted to be Spider-Man”
Asked directly whether Jackson had really wanted to buy the company, Lee did not hedge. “Yes, he wanted to. He felt that would be the only way that he could play Spider-Man.”
And here is the part that makes it plausible rather than ridiculous. Marvel was collapsing. Today it is a multi-billion dollar machine, but in the mid-1990s the company was drowning. It filed for bankruptcy in 1996. Its stock was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. Its animated shows were fading, and its comics had lost their shine. It ultimately merged with the toy company Toy Biz to survive. For someone with Jackson’s fortune, a wounded Marvel looked like a very buyable thing.
The Unbelievable True Story of Michael Jackson’s Lost Spider-Man Movie | Mini Documentary
Jackson’s nephew Taj Jackson confirmed the family side of the story in a 2020 interview, and his account adds a detail nobody expected. This was not a passing whim. Taj remembers sitting with his brothers while his uncle talked about purchasing Marvel, and he says Michael wanted to do it alongside Stan Lee as a partner. In Taj’s words, the two men “had been talking and discussing that.” Then it stopped. “They were shut down from doing that,” he said, adding that he did not know the reasons why, but that both sides had been serious about finishing the deal.
So the deal died, and history took the other road. Sam Raimi directed Spider-Man in 2002 with Tobey Maguire in the suit, and the film’s success helped rebuild Marvel into the force it became. In 2009, Disney bought Marvel for $4 billion — the same year Michael Jackson died.
Would he have been any good? Stan Lee thought so, and said as much: he reckoned Jackson would have been very good, while adding that Tobey Maguire was wonderful. But Lee was also honest about the business side, in the driest possible way. Asked what Marvel would look like today if Jackson had bought it, he replied that it might not have been as successful, because “Michael was not a great businessman.”
Still, somewhere in an alternate timeline, the man who invented the moonwalk is swinging between skyscrapers in red and blue.