By the time the Marvel movie juggernaut was starting to chart big box-office numbers in the early 2000s, Stan Lee was largely a figurehead in the Marvel business. But the movies and television shows based on characters he helped create in the previous four decades would reach far more people than his comic creations ever did.

His legacy characters were repurposed from a waning platform - comics readership had been on the retreat since the advent of television - to one that seems to set a new box-office record every year with the Marvel Cinematic Universe that began with Iron Man (2008).