Michael Jackson loved comic books, and one hero stood above the rest for him. Spider-Man. The kid from Queens who got powers from a spider bite, who never quite fit in, who hid who he really was behind a mask. You can see why that character spoke to him.
So Michael did what few people would even think to do. He went straight to the man who helped dream Spider-Man up.
That man was Stan Lee. If you’ve watched any superhero movie in the last 20 years, you’ve seen his little cameos. Back in the 1960s, Stan Lee co-created Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men and a whole shelf of Marvel heroes. By the 1990s he was the public face of Marvel Comics, the company behind all of them.
Michael came to him wanting the rights to Spider-Man. And here’s where it gets bigger than anyone expected.
Stan Lee later recalled that Michael didn’t just want to star in a Spider-Man film. He wanted to buy Marvel. The whole company.
The timing almost made it possible. Marvel was in real trouble back then and filed for bankruptcy in 1996, so a company that size was actually up for grabs. Stan explained that he wasn’t the one who could hand over Spider-Man anyway.
“He thought I’d be the one who could get him the rights [to Spider-Man], and I told him I couldn’t,” Stan said in 2009. “He would have to go to the Marvel company. But we did become friendly, and he was a great guy.”
Back in 2009, Stan wasn’t totally sure how far Michael meant to take it. “I’m not sure whether he just wanted to produce it or wanted to play the role,” he said at the time.
A few years later he put it more plainly. Asked in 2012 whether Michael had really wanted to own Marvel, Stan answered, “Yes, he wanted to. He felt that would be the only way that he could play Spider-Man.”
Think about that. Michael figured the surest way to play his favorite hero was to own the hero outright.
Michael’s nephew Taj Jackson, who grew up close to his uncle, talked about it in 2020. He said talks with Stan Lee about buying Marvel were “shut down.” So the deal never happened, and the two kings of their own worlds just stayed friendly instead.
The best part of this story is watching Stan Lee tell it himself. The way he smiles while he says it tells you how much he enjoyed knowing Michael.
Stan Lee tells the story of Michael and Marvel on camera
It’s a small, warm window into a friendship almost nobody knew about. Two men who built imaginary worlds for a living, sitting down over one shared dream. And somewhere in another version of the world, Michael Jackson really did pull on the mask.