“How much money did I make?”
It’s a question that Jon Bolerjack never thought he’d hear the man sitting next to him ask. Comics legend Stan Lee‘s ideas and hustle birthed an empire. So how could he not know about all the money he’d just made doing a signing at a comic-book convention?
That was the moment Bolerjack says he knew something awful was happening to the man behind some of Marvel Comics’ most beloved characters.
It was 2015, and Bolerjack, a long-haired, tattooed comic-book fanatic, had been chronicling Lee’s every move as his personal videographer. He would stay in the legend’s inner circle until Lee’s death in November 2018 at age 95.
Lee was at the height of his popularity in the last decade of his life, thanks to the smashing success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe at the box office. It made him a marquee name on the convention circuit, demanding top dollar to sit in a chair and sign whatever was put in front of him. After his appearances, his team would count the piles upon piles of cash he made.
Bolerjack’s 108-minute documentary, “Stan Lee: The Final Chapter,” available now on Video on Demand, chronicles the dark side of Lee’s final four years. The doc depicts an exhausted and seemingly unaware Lee on a nonstop convention schedule, dozing off between autograph signings and asking his bodyguard-turned-manager, Max Anderson, if he’s made enough money to retire.
The documentary’s journey to the screen would be a long one: Anderson sued Bolerjack in 2019 for breach of contract, alleging that Bolerjack had broken an “oral agreement” between them that he would give Anderson all his footage of Lee.
“My lawyer thought it would take six months… it ended up taking six years,” Bolerjack told Business Insider. The case was dismissed in June 2025 when Anderson did not report for the jury trial. That same month, Anderson was sentenced to a year and one day in prison after pleading guilty to tax fraud, after allegedly failing to report $1.2 million in proceeds to the IRS.
A month earlier, Lee’s daughter, JC, settled a lawsuit she brought against Anderson, alleging he stole over $21 million from her father; the terms were not disclosed.
Anderson denies ever taking money from Lee. He told Business Insider he had a different arrangement with the icon: He would have Lee sign things.
“I got a majority of my money on signatures,” Anderson told Business Insider. “I would sell that to the dealers. So my autographs, a signed comic book of Spider-Man #1, I’m getting $1,500 to $2,000.”
As for the documentary footage implying Lee’s convention schedule was too grueling for a man of his age, Anderson said that Lee preferred to stay busy, particularly after the death of his wife, Joan, in 2017.
“He didn’t want to be home anymore because there’s no reason to be home,” Anderson said.
Though several stories about Lee allegedly being taken advantage of were written before his death, Bolerjack, whom Lee nicknamed “Hairspray” and made his personal assistant in the final months of his life, said few realized the extent of what was going on. Or perhaps they didn’t want to know.
“My time with Stan taught me that Stan was most useful as a caricature,” Bolerjack said. “He just smiles, says ‘Excelsior,’ signs your comic — they don’t want any depth. They just want Stan’s face on a lunchbox and don’t want to deal with the other stuff. So my story makes that a little more muddy, showing Stan as a living, breathing person.”
Searching for a True Believer
Bolerjack took Lee’s death hard. For months, he mourned the loss of his friend; he said it ate away at him that no one knew the extent of the abuse Lee allegedly went through at the end of his life.
Bolerjack said he tried to alert the press while Lee was alive, offering a thumb drive containing his footage to several news outlets, but never heard back from any of them.
By 2019, Bolerjack had decided to make a documentary.
“I thought it was important to his legacy that it be as honest as possible, and I didn’t want to concede that control,” Bolerjack said.
But he needed help. With a background in post-production and film marketing, Bolerjack knew some people in the business. It led him to connect with Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Robert Kenner (2008’s “Food, Inc.”).
The two agreed to co-direct a documentary on Lee’s final years, with the footage Bolerjack shot being the main focus. But the bites they got on the project lost momentum when the pandemic hit in 2020; Kenner ultimately walked away.
Bolerjack rebounded post-pandemic when he connected with the production company Edgeline Films (2016’s “Weiner,” and the Showtime series “Couples Therapy”); they agreed in 2021 for Bolerjack to co-direct a docuseries with longtime editor/director Kim Roberts, according to emails viewed by Business Insider. They began to take meetings, but Bolerjack said some executives minimized the importance of the subject matter.
“They would tell us comic book fans don’t watch documentaries — there was this odd pushback,” Bolerjack said. “We would tell them, a billion people saw ‘The Avengers’ movies. We had to explain to them what Comic Con was and how hundreds of thousands of people show up. They just didn’t get it.”
Eventually, Roberts left the project.
Going it alone
By 2023, Bolerjack was back where he started: He had the footage of Lee’s final years, but nowhere to show it. He decided it was time to make the movie himself.
With fellow comic fans Alex Barajas and George Chan on board as his producers, the trio scrounged together $80,000 and started setting up interviews with people in Lee’s inner circle, as well as other comic greats like Deadpool creator Rob Liefeld and Stan Lee’s first successor as Marvel Comics’ editor in chief, Roy Thomas.
“I called all my camera friends and asked if they were free for a day, and hoped they wouldn’t rake me over the coals on the day rate,” said Bolerjack of hiring friends to help shoot interviews. “By this point, Stan had been gone five or six years. The people I needed to talk to, that sense of camaraderie fades over time, so there was a sense of urgency.”
By March 2025, the team had a trailer but needed a little more money for post-production. So they decided to launch the trailer with a Kickstarter campaign to raise more funds.
News of the project was written up by popular comic sites and major publications like USA Today and IndieWire. They didn’t hit their $300,000 goal, but the attention legitimized the project and helped secure enough funding from new investors to finish the movie. Bolerjack said the documentary’s final budget was $500,000.
Bolerjack finally showed the movie to an audience in June 2026 at Dances With Films, an independent film festival in Los Angeles, where it won the Industry Choice Award prize.
“When Stan died, the day he died in the hospital, I cried. I wept for 40 minutes,” Bolerjack said. “It was the most I ever cried. Stan is the first person I knew who has died. I had never experienced that before. In the theater was the first time I cried since then. To get the approval of strangers, and then we won a prize — it was really rewarding.”
Finally being able to tell Lee’s story and have it out in the world has brought Bolerjack peace.
“It was roadblock after roadblock,” he said. “But I had to finish what I started.”
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