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Does Disney really own The Avengers?

Stan Lee's former company wants $5.5 billion from the Marvel owner

The ownership of 'The Avengers' and various other Marvel Comics superheroes is at the centre of a billion dollar lawsuit.

Stan Lee's former company Stan Lee Media Inc wants profits of $5.5 billion (£3.5 billion) that Walt Disney has made from the likes of Iron Man, Spider-Man, The Avengers and The X-Men.

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The suit claims that Disney does not legally own the rights to the comic book characters, and SLMI wants the 'maximum statutory damages allowable' handed over.

“Defendant The Walt Disney Company has represented to the public that it, in fact, owns the copyright to these characters as well as to hundreds of other characters created by Stan Lee,” the suit reads.

“Those representations made to the public by The Walt Disney Company are false.”

It says that when Stan Lee signed over the rights of his characters to Disney in 1998, they actually didn't belong to him, but to the company SLMI which was decimated when the dotcom bubble burst in the late 90s.

SLMI wants a jury to decide whether various legal wranglings in the late 90s and early 2000s mean that Disney - who bought Marvel for $4 billion (£2.4 billion) in 2009 - aren't entitled to the vast profits it's made with Lee and his creations since he signed over those rights.

But SLMI has failed in previous attempts to claw back money it claims belongs to it, in what it calls a 'tortured history of litigation'.

The case continues...