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Just a decade ago, Marvel Entertainment was nothing more than a comic books creator.

Now it's a $4 billion behemoth that is now owned by the Walt Disney Co.

Disney, the parent corporation of ABC and many other properties, purchased Marvel for $50 a share in a cash-stock deal, according to Forbes magazine. That will bring under the Disney umbrella some of the biggest comic book characters of all time, including Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Incredible Hulk and Ironman.

How Disney will handle future movie production is up in the air. Before Marvel started making its own films like the 2008 version of "Iron Man" with Robert Downey Jr., Marvel partnered with other studios to bring its comic characters to the big screen. For instance, the Spider-Man trilogy was done through Sony while Twentieth Century Fox was in charge of all four X-Men films. Both franchises alone created box office revenues of nearly $3 billion.

Disney doesn't plan to do any high-level housecleaning at Marvel for now, keeping Ike Perlmutter, the chief executive of Marvel, in charge of the show, but now as part of the Disney family.

Although shareholders of Disney and Marvel have approved the deal, it still has to be vetted by regulators to make sure it clears antitrust hurdles, which it is expected to do.

Marvel, a public company traded on the New York Stock Exchange, reported a profit of $205.5 million last year on revenue of $671.2 million, well ahead of its 2007 pace of a $139.8 million profit on revenue of $485.8 million, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Walt Disney Co. is far larger, earning a profit in 2008 of $4.4 billion on revenue of $37.8 billion compared to 2007 when it picked up a slightly higher profit of $4.7 billion on $35.5 billion on revenue, according to the SEC.