Disney buys Marvel for $4 Billion
Monday, August 31st, 2009
In a move that’s sure to shake up more than just the comic industry, The Walt Disney Company (owners of ABC, ESPN, and more) have purchase Marvel. Along with the deal, they gain rights to Marvel’s over 5000 strong library of characters.
Questions will now be raised as to how this will effect the future of all Marvel comics, movies, and video games, amongst other potential properties such as television shows. This now makes Marvel part of one of the biggest media conglomerations around, competing on a similar level to the Warner Bros. owned DC Comics. There is no doubt that this comes with some inherent bonuses. The ability for product placement in movies and TV shows could be a huge advertisement stream for the comic giant, for instant.
However, it’s clear that the DC Comics/Warner Bros. merger of the past hasn’t always worked out in the favor of DC Comics. Being restricted to only having your movies produced by Warner Bros. has in recent years led the DC movies to be of a lower quality level than the Marvel properties. For every Batman Begins and The Dark Knight that the company has released, there have been equally troubling decisions such as Catwoman and the Joel Schumacher Batman films. In addition, it has been at times puzzling as to why Warner Bros. has failed to take advantage of the Super Hero movie boom of sorts that we had been witnessing in recent years.
However, for better or worse, this move is the future of Marvel Comics. You certainly have to give credit to Disney for recognizing good opertunities to grow their company. In 1995, Disney picked up a majority stake in ABC and ESPN. Disney followed up in 2006 with the purchase of Pixar Studios. Amongst a handful of other properties, Disney is certainly creating a strong family of companies to compete in the modern media market. Time will tell which of the two parties, if not both, will benefit from this arrangement. But it’s needless to say that the game has changed.
(Kotaku)
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Very interesting. I can’t help but think this will be a bad move in a lot of regards, especially considering how strong Marvel Studios was becoming as a movie company. And now to be under Walt Disney Pictures? Maybe they will keep the group intact ala Pixar.
But, will we be seeing animated Marvel musicals? TV Shows? Sports teams?
wasn’t there already a Spider-Man musical on broadway or something? :) (If I’m mistaken let me know)
It is still up in the air. Rachel Evan Woods is on board from last I hear, but they were still looking for someone to play Peter.
Just a few days ago actually, I heard the Broadway musical that’s been in development for a while now, was canceled as it’s become too expensive to produce.
This may prove intresting. Not all of marvel’s movie were very good. X-men 3 and Wolverine was alright but… And they just tried to cram to much into Spiderman 3. DC has been kicking Marvels butt with the animation dvd’s Marvel’s have been Okay but DC’s have been awesome. I think this may be good for Marvel. We’ll see and hopefully they’ll let people who love the source material do the actual work in creating the future films , tv , dvds.
X-Men 3 and Wolverine were far from alright. However, none of the movies you listed were actually made by Marvel. X-Men 3 and Wolverine were made by Fox. Spiderman 3 was Sony.
The Marvel movies were The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man. seems like there was another one that I can’t recall. Also, the upcoming Iron Man 2, Captain America, Thor, and Avengers were all going to be Marvel movies.
I really can’t argue with you about X3 and Wolverine , I was just trying to be kind. The actual Marvel movies were awesome. I still think this maybe good for Marvel though If its one thing Disney knows its their audience.
The thing I’ve read in all of this that gets me excited is that there is more than a small chance that Pixar will get to play with some Marvel properties. The rumor is that Jon Lasseter met with Marvel before this deal was final and they all got very excited….whatever that means. Anyway, I guess we’ll see how this shakes out in the future. Hopefully this will be a good thing for Marvel, just like it was for Pixar a few years ago.
That does make me very excited. I’d love to see a Pixar animated version of some of the properties.
It always saddens me to see another independent media outlet gobbled up by a larger conglomeration. Marvel seemed to be doing a pretty damn good job at staying autonomous even when DC was owned by Warner Bros.
I just don’t like the smell of such conglomeration…
Oh good god for serious… I’ll have to clean my comp again, sorry about that bug. (Funny considering what the rant was about.)
This is so sad. I can just imagine what will happen to Marvel studio when they start getting their notes from Disney. I can just imagine every line from every script going through the Disney grinder.
I don’t know if that’s something to really worry about. They don’t do that with Pixar, Lion’s Gate, or Miramax I don’t see why they’d do it with Marvel. When Disney’s brand name isn’t explicitly on the product they don’t really tend to worry about the film like that beyond what their take would be.
Anyone else ever wonder what ol’ Walt’s cryo head thinks about his little production studio he started with his brother becoming a juggernaut of media control?
I know some people are speculating that Disneyland/world/etc might be opening up some Marvel-inspired theme park rides though…
That’s a good point, as the six islands of adventure has a Marvel super hero island.
yeah, I don’t think Disney is going to try to Disney-fy Marvel either. I think the reason huge world dominating corporations buy these smaller companies is because they are looking to diversify.
A lot of people, talking about the news today, have claimed that disney has never released an R rated film. That’s sort of true but Disney owned Miramax. So everything they do doesn’t have mouse ears and star wholesom singing teenagers.
Pixar could do a great Silver Surfer movie. Or Thor film set in asgard.
Disney doesn’t release R rated movies, because they have 50 studios that they own that does. They do a good job of organizing their projects into the right categories.
Mostly, the crack about Disney singalongs was a joke. Though, there is nothing stopping them from using some of the Marvel properties to create more traditional Disney-esque properties. With Pixar, they did make some various TV shows based on some of the characters that was pretty typically Disney.