Infographic: Which Studios Own The Marvel Characters?

When we talk about Marvel movies, we're usually talking about Marvel Studios movies — the ones that tie into The Avengers and are distributed by Disney. But the Marvel Comics stable of characters is actually spread all over Hollywood. Marvel sold off the film rights to various studios in the '80s, and it wasn't until the mid-'00s that they began collecting them back to launch the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

As of now, Marvel has regained most, but not all of its properties, and it can be confusing to remember which studio still has which heroes. So The Geek Twins have created a handy infographic laying out exactly which characters live where. Now you'll know exactly where to direct your angry letter the next time you get to wondering why Namor the Sub-Mariner hasn't gotten his own feature yet. Hit the jump to check it out.

[via io9]

Obviously, this isn't a comprehensive list of every Marvel character ever. These are just the main characters, and it's safe to assume that any supporting characters associated with the main characters also belong to the same studio. Gwen Stacy, for example, is unlikely to shoot into space with the Fantastic Four anytime soon.

The exceptions are Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. As we've covered before, the superpowered twins are associated with both the Avengers and the X-Men. This means Quicksilver is able to appear in both X-Men: Days of Future Past and Avengers: Age of Ultron, played by two different actors (Evan Peters and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, respectively), but is not able to reference his mutant heritage in the latter. (While Sony has a lock on core Spider-Man characters, Fox has mutants under its thumb.) As we said, it's all rather confusing.

Otherwise, any characters not included on this list can be assumed to be the property of Marvel Studios. Well, aside from Stan Lee, whom the Geek Twins note "is awesome and can go anywhere." For a more comprehensive list of characters, hit the artists' official website.