20th Century Fox in talks to sell most of company to Disney

I want to see Avengers and X-men please… and then we bust it up… or we let people who want to see indie films, continue to see indie films. We also have other sources of news and television.

Given how cagey Disney has been about post Avengers 4 stuff for like two years, I wonder how long ago these talks really started. These are big deals that take a lot of time. I have to think they were hedging their bets, even way back when.

I think the scarier thing to look at re:Disney is how they’re leveraging the next Star Wars.

I can easily see that expanding to where the only movies able to be seen in theaters are made by Disney.

That said, I’d love me some X-men and Avengers action, so I get where people are coming from.

Ohhhh… I get it.

You’re worried that Disney will resurrect the dead, decaying corpse of the theater system to use it as their own personal screening method, and you’re afraid of the dark, necromantic arts that would require, given the unintended consequences such powers produce.

Makes sense now.

Or they’ll force everyone else out of the market with their exclusive screening deals and then jack up the rates for Blu-Rays on the backend while keeping anyone from streaming anything without paying them directly.

Monopolies are never good for consumers. Just because they have a cartoon mouse mascot and treat their employees fairly well doesn’t make them any less a corporation willing to fuck everyone over to increase profits.

They’re already going to leave Netflix for their own service. I don’t expect you’ll ever see anything they own streamed anywhere else ever again. Once they own the lion’s share of all movies made they can step in and replace Netflix/Amazon. I doubt they’ll be doing it for less than $15-20 a month. Remember they’ll own… damned near everything out there.

I barely have enough time as it is. I could use a good excuse to stop watching movies.

BTW, $20 per month would be chump change to keep my kids entertained. Maybe it will be higher.

They also have the rights to a ton of sports through ESPN too.

DIS is up a little over 1% in after hours trading, so this is either priced in, or not a huge mover yet.

Annnnnd official now.

Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox has agreed to sell its entertainment assets to Disney in a $66bn (£49bn) deal that transforms his media empire by offloading a 39% stake in Sky.

The takeover involves the 86-year-old tycoon and his family taking a 4.25% stake in Disney with assets including the 20th Century Fox film studio, the controlling stake in Britain’s biggest pay-TV broadcaster and a number of cable channels going in the other direction. Murdoch will retain control of the profitable, and controversial, Fox News channel.

The deal will not, for now, impact the proposed takeover by 21st Century Fox of the 61% of Sky it does not own. The Competition and Markets Authority will continue to investigate the deal as a Murdoch-brokered takeover, pending Fox’s Sky stake officially changing hands.

Official statement

Really weird to think about what Disney is going to do with a property like Deadpool. They’ve tried having alternative brands (Touchstone) and stopped doing that, but there’s no way you put out Deadpool 2 under the Disney label.

Maybe they’ll keep the 21st Century Fox label for those types of projects.

Could they not just put it out as Marvel?

Still tough, IMO. They need to figure out what they’re going to do with all of those more adult properties (R-rated movies specifically).

Touchstone would be the new fit, then. It’s where a lot (but not all) of their R rated content lands.

I wonder if Disney will negotiate with Constantin Films for the Fantastic Four rights?

Yeah, they may bring it back to prominence, but I’m going to place my bet on them keeping the 21st Century Fox label for properties they acquire in the deal that they won’t move over to Disney proper.

But this really is huge. They get The Simpsons, Avatar, the original Star Wars movies, most of the Marvel rights, and the FX and FXX networks. They also get an additional 30% of Hulu, giving them a majority stake with only Comcast (which is a “silent partner”) still in the mix.

Basically this sets them up with huge, huge leverage when they launch their own streaming network in 2019. They have a TON of content, and will have extraordinary negotiating power with iTunes and other services that want it.

Really, the next power move that makes sense for both companies is for Disney and Apple to merge into a full-stack provider of hardware and content. It’s not impossible to imagine.

With the recent note from Disney that a streaming service is coming, this bodes well for quite a bit more content only being available from their streaming source.

It certainly shakes things up, but I guess we will find out how things end up, pretty quickly.

This seems very likely in general (if nothing else, it’s a much stronger brand than Touchstone). But I’d be amazed if they didn’t consolidate the Marvel stuff. If only so that they never again have to go through the X-Men and Spiderman fiascos.

Note also that Sky is a major distributor of content in Europe, and a broadband provider in the UK. It’s basically Comcast, but with satellites. And it has its own streaming service (several, if you include Sky Q, which is internet delivered).

I totally agree, but there are some challenges. Deadpool and Logan would be tough to pull into the same house as the rest of the PG-13 Marvel properties. And they’ve been very successful so I think they’re going to need to do some creative thinking there. Maybe an offshoot Marvel label.

I don’t think the average person on the street thinks of Captain America as a Disney franchise and Deadpool as a Fox one. To the extent they think about them as being associated with companies, its with Marvel.