Meet The Guys Behind The Original 'Big Hero 6' 

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Meet The Guys Behind The Original \'Big Hero 6\'

When Disney bought Marvel in 2009 for $4 billion, it got an enormous universe of superheroes like Iron Man, Thor and Captain America that the studio has successfully exploited to the tune of $7 billion at the box office with nine more films teed up through 2019.

But it also got lots of smaller, more obscure comic books. One of those was

stories but the executives at Disney saw potential in the comic for an animated franchise. This weekend

hits theaters and it’s expected to earn $65 million opening weekend. The film is getting great reviews (it scores an 86 out of 100 on Rotten Tomatoes) and unlike a movie like

is clearly designed as an origin story with plenty of franchise potential. If the film does well this weekend, expect Disney to start green lighting sequels pretty quickly.

comic are a group of writers who call themselves Man of Action Entertainment. The group met while working at Marvel in the ’90s before comic books became the hottest route to a hit movie.

“We were working on X-Men but Marvel was bankrupt which made it difficult,” says Steven T. Seagle. “We all migrated to DC Comics where we worked on Superman but that was a difficult time to be working on Superman. We liked working together though so we thought, why not work together and make up our own franchises.”

So in 2001 they set up shop as Man of Action. The company works as a collective giving the creative writers the heft of a real company when negotiating with publishers and studios.

“Companies negotiate very differently with another company than with an individual,” says Duncan Rouleau who along with Seagle, Joe Casey and Joe Kelly make up the collective. “They have more respect for another company than for an individual.”

The group writes their own comic books and pitches TV ideas. Their biggest hit so far is

which has aired on Cartoon Network since 2006 and spawned a $3 billion empire of shows and merchandise. The cartoon centers on a boy who finds a device that lets him turn into ten different aliens. Kids love the mix of humor and action on the show as well as the heavy dose of wish fulfillment. Who wouldn’t want to be able to turn into a giant alien monster at will to defeat the bad guys?

That sense of wish fulfillment is present in Disney’s

and it was there in the original comic book too. In the movie, Hiro Hamada, a child genius who heads to a fancy M.I.T-type school at the age of 14, loses his parents and then his brother. But from his loss he builds a new family of tech geniuses (and one giant inflatable robot) who become a team of superheroes. Their powers come from suits that Hiro builds to suit each person’s style and technical specialty. A woman who works with chemicals gets a purse that can quickly combine any chemicals to make special bombs. Another student, who specializes in frictionless wheels, gets roller skates and boomerang wheels to throw.

Most of those elements were there in Man of Action’s original

. Inspired by the bright colors and pop culture of Japanese comics and fashion, the original

was set in Japan. (Disney moved the action to the fictional, and incredibly gorgeous, city of San Fransokyo.) Honey Lemon had her magical purse but she could actually pull anything from the universe out of it, not just chemicals.

The biggest change was Baymax. In the movie, Baymax is an inflatable nursing robot that Hiro’s brother had designed to help people. In the comic books, he was not inflatable and served as more of a surrogate father to Hiro keeping his youthful instincts in check and watching over the newly formed family of superheroes.

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