Two Comic Writers Got Paid for a Minor Character Appearing in X-Men: Dark Phoenix for 30 Seconds

We're all used to cameos and minor characters appearing in our superhero movies but us fans tend to forget that there are creators behind these fictional people. Some of us also forget that there are usually royalties when it comes to these characters making appearances, thanks to comic book movies becoming the norm and studios wanting to play nice with creators so that they can use more of their characters.

Color us surprised that a creator has talked about a character he co-created appearing in X-Men: Dark Phoenix and how he got paid for it. Nunzio Defelippis was known for a New X-Men run with co-writer Christina Weir back in the day, introducing interesting characters like Hellion, Surge, and Anole, among others. They also made a character named Match, who is a basic fire-powered mutant that didn't get a lot of comic book time but somehow appeared in Dark Phoenix.

According to Defelippis (via Bleeding Cool), they were recently contacted about getting paid for this character, even though he only had 30 seconds of movie time. Here's what he had to say about that:

"So today Christina and I were notified of a character payment coming our way from Marvel because someone we created was in X-MEN DARK PHOENIX. We had to look the film (which we haven't seen because we still have to see APOCALYPSE first) up on IMDB to find out that Match (of all characters) is in it."

"Totally grateful and excited… but… Match? Really?"

"Who knew?"

There might be fans who balk at this news, given how minor this character was, but payment to creators should be the norm. It wasn't too long ago when comic creators like Len Wein weren't given paychecks, despite movies like the original X-Men using Wolverine to great effect. This is good news overall and it has us excited for comic book creators now that superhero movies are the new cool thing.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix comes to Blu-Ray on September 17.

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