Disney Buys Marvel?!
The Walt Disney Co. said Monday it is acquiring Marvel Entertainment Inc. for $4 billion in cash and stock, bringing characters like Iron Man and Spider-Man into the family of Mickey Mouse and WALL-E.
Under the deal, Disney will acquire ownership of 5,000 Marvel characters. Many of them, including favorites such as the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, were co-created by the comic book legend Stan Lee.
I have no idea what this means. I’m still a bit besmoggled by the whole announcement.
I know that this definitely solves what I always saw as one of Marvel’s weaknesses against DC — DC has been owned and supported by Time-Warner for decades, while Marvel was mostly on its own, despite all of its successes. Marvel now has Disney’s considerable economic and marketing clout to fall back on, if necessary.
Does this mean we’ll see Howard the Duck go back to his more Disneyesque appearance that he used to have? Heck, are we gonna see a Howard the Duck/Scrooge McDuck crossover? That might be fairly cool.
Okay, I’m also looking forward to the inevitable Wolverine/Mickey Mouse team-up.
Wow, still pretty blown away by this. What are y’all thinking about this whole thing?
Simon Said,
August 31, 2009 @ 12:47 pm
Do not forget about the movies also. Paramount is releasing Iron Man 2, which is in post production; and there are a couple of Marvel movies in pre-production and production, what will happen to them, Disney will want a cut of them, and since the rights to some of these movies are still under negotiations will Disney put a halt on all current projects.
Also, some of these movies planned release dates could end up in competition with release dates for disney movies. Will Disney compete with movies coming from a different production house where they will only see a fraction of the profits or what?
This is gonna get interesting Scott. I am oddly excited.
Scott Slemmons Said,
August 31, 2009 @ 1:17 pm
I doubt Disney will interfere with the “Iron Man” sequel — by the time they’ve gotten this far with film production, the rights and permissions have been properly hammered out, and transfer of ownership of one of the companies is not likely to get in the way of that. They may negotiate to make it a Paramount-Disney production, but they won’t try to derail it, and I doubt they’ll release any films to compete with it (if they were planning to, they’re crazy, ’cause “Iron Man” will very likely rule any weekend it opens on). Disney will probably take over production for the third movie, unless Paramount already has a contract in place.
And yes, a lot of the reason Disney wanted Marvel is because of their extremely impressive film library. This is going to get freakin’ spectacularly interesting…
Kenny Ketner Said,
August 31, 2009 @ 5:56 pm
Kenny Ketner Said,
August 31, 2009 @ 5:56 pm
Hmm. Didn’t post my image:
http://www.4thletter.net/gavok/venom/mickey.jpg
Scott Slemmons Said,
August 31, 2009 @ 6:53 pm
That’s brilliant. 🙂
swampy Said,
August 31, 2009 @ 9:41 pm
I hope Pixar gets to do some Marvel animated movies…that would be cool