This deal was in the works for a while now, and to be honest, I didn’t think it would happen this quickly. Disney has agreed to purchase 21st Century Fox in a stock transaction valued at $52.4 billion. The deal still has to be approved by the Justice Department.
I’m still kind of trying to wrap my head around this. So what does this mean exactly? Allow me a moment to put down a bullet list:
- Well for starters, the X-Men and the Avengers film franchises can now exist in the same universe.
- There is a small chance that any future Fantastic Four movies won’t suck.
- Galactus could be something other than a stupid cloud.
- Deadpool is now Disney-owned.
- As is Family Guy and The Simpsons.
- All of Joss Whedon’s shows that aired on fox, like Firefly.
- If the aliens from the Alien franchise have genders, the female ones would be Disney Princesses.
- Oh yeah, we could see LEGO sets based other film franchises. Like Die Hard! Bring on a UCS Nakatomi Plaza!
Okay, I’m (partially) kidding about a UCS Nakatomi Plaza. Maybe an Architecture set at least.
This is kind of a big deal. Hard to fathom exactly what will happen but the future of entertainment won’t be the same, that’s for sure.
Edit: This also means Disney is now the majority stakeholder of Hulu. This may change Disney’s plan to offer their own streaming service and concentrate their efforts there. Which means that the rumored Star Wars television show may end up streaming on Hulu.
Unfortunately, this didn’t bring all of the rights back into the house of the mouse, though. Universal still has the rights to the Hulk, so we won’t be getting a Planet Hulk film anytime soon (given that apparently Universal has more or less ignored any overtures to work with other studios and hates money).
Likewise, Sony still technically owns the rights for most of the Spiderverse stuff… Marvel got the rights to make Spider-man films for Sony, but not the control rights.
More on the Star Wars front, I also believe that this will put all of the distribution rights for the Star Wars films strictly into Disney’s hands, so maybe, just maybe, we will finally get some unaltered cuts and the like digitally.
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