Marvel studios has sold the cable rights to five movies – Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and three others to be determined – to FX, and the licensing fee that they’ll receive is a function of each movie’s domestic gross.

As with most of the basic-cable pre-buys, the net agrees to pony up a license fee that hovers at around 11% of the domestic gross, a figure that cuts off at $200 million. If all five movies end up as $200 million-plus blockbusters — a very big if, of course — FX would pay the maximum $22 million apiece for a grand total of $110 million. That’s a gigantic license fee, but lots of people watch big-hit movies on cable TV, so there wouldn’t be any complaints from FX.

I had no idea that this was how it worked. But I guess that $22 million, say, would be spread over a number of years, and that they’d show the movie probably a dozen times each year. So I guess it’d be easy to recoup that from advertisers? Still, pretty interesting.

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