A fairly common belief among fans is that Uni will give up or be forced in the near future by Disney to relinquish their usage of Marvel properties. However, due to the contractual agreements, Uni has fair use of Marvel IPs East of the Mississippi River. Universal gets to decide when and if they choose to hand over the Orlando theme park rights to Marvel, and at a pricetag of their choosing. It would be highly unlikely that Disney would pay dearly for the rights considering all of the cash handed over to Uni just for acquiring usage, let alone building a ride/land itself.
In a nutshell, Marvel is pretty comfortable at Islands of Adventure right now and will be for many more years to come.
Putting aside the legal issues--which is dumb, I know, they make this a moot discussion--why would TDO want to build Marvel attractions anywhere near Orlando? Guest confusion would be off the charts. And what in the past 20 years has shown you that TDO can build
anything that would look favorable compared to Hulk and Spider-man? Whatever Marvel rides Disney threw together in the next 3 - 5 years would end up looking like the IoA rides' poor country cousins. "Remember that Spider-man ride at Universal? It was so much better than this."
Far easier to build a Cars Land where the value engineering isn't readily apparent unless guests have been to Anaheim.
That's been said before yes. But so has a lot of things. I don't think many people have first hand knowledge about the contract, and it's one of those rumors that's taken on a life of its own on the net.
It's pretty standard for any contract--basically a requirement of good faith dealing. I remember reading it (the contract is out there on the interwebs, Reel Justice probably knows where to find it) and coming away with the impression if IoA wanted a Captain America coaster--based on the comic book look, not the Chris Evans look--and they kept it red, white and blue with some stars and don't show Cap wearing a pink tutu or anything, there wasn't much if anything Disney could do to stop them. Same goes for any X-Men.
This goes back to the Avengers monorail news breaking, but to me the only major questions in the contract are:
(1) Is Iron Man covered? He was a B-lister when the thing was signed, so he doesn't appear by name, but presumably is grouped in with "The Avengers" (IIRC, the contract says "Capt. America and the Avengers" ... which is pretty much every Marvel hero ever). Is that catchall and a 2-D cutout of old Shellhead enough to give IoA exclusive rights?
(2) What is a "theme park"? Remember, this is why the Avengers monorail can't go to EPCOT--it would enter the park. But now Universal has set precedent, somewhat, that the TTC and hotels are
not "theme parks" for whatever that's worth. The $20 million question for me would be whether or not DisneyQuest is covered under the contract.