Disney to acquire Marvel for $4 billion

They have been announced for a while now.

If you have been to the park in the last 4-5 monthes, you could check out the blue sky celler where they have concept art for all the new attractions making there way into the park.

http://disneyland.disney.go.com/disneyland/en_US/parks/attractions/detail?name=BlueSkyCellarAttractionPage

RatherGoodBear said:
Tell Universal that Nickolodeon's available.

Do Nickoloden and Univeral have a good realtionship since the Nick Studios use to be at Universal and now arent?

From my buddy who worked at IOA for 6 years. He been pretty on about stuff in the past. Take it for what its worth.

"From what I understand it's a proprietary deal. Universal owns the rights to Marvel theme parks east of the Mississippi. I don't think this expires. A couple years ago Marvel was bankrupt and you could purchase intellectual properties from them for pocket cash. That's all in the past. If Disney wants it they will have to pay for it and I bet the price just went way, way up."

"Disney's Ironman 3"

"Disney's The Avengers"

"Disney's The Incredible Hulk 2"

I really hope they leave Marvel's branding on the Marvel properties, and the Disney brand away from anything Marvel. Another words, keep 'em separate.

egieszl said:
At this point I don't see a 6th Disney theme park in Florida.

Especially since they don't have a 5th park yet anyway...

To all of you ready to give old fashion Disney its last rites, I remind you of a little movie called Enchanted, and everything I have read about the upcoming Princess and the Frog has people placing it on the same level as the late 80s/early 90s second golden age films (Little Mermaid-Lion King.)

I think this is a great development, I really look forward to Pixar produced Marvel comics, I also hope this means that the 90s Spiderman TV show is now finally going to come to DVD (Disney has owned the rights for a while.)

I think Disney is going to manage Marvel from arms length.
I hear all the time the general public thinks the Universal parks are a part of Disney. How much more confused will they get if Disney attaches there brand to Marvel.

Universal is not stupid enough to void this contract by re-branding the island .Then Disney would be free to build a Marvel park .

The only difference we might see at the park is if Disney attaches there name to branded merchandise
at the park.

Disney will be able to use these at Disneyland but if they do it will just make more confusion.
A spiderman ride in Disneyland would be bad for business and Disney doesn't want to risk being called a copycat.Plus I would be surprised if universal did not trademark the ride names.

Disney bought this for the movie franchise.There movies make money.Plus the IP property of future
comics turned into movies.It is much cheaper to publish a comic and if it gets a buzz started then turn into a multi movie franchise.

The Mole said:

egieszl said:
At this point I don't see a 6th Disney theme park in Florida.

Especially since they don't have a 5th park yet anyway...

Thanks for pointing out my mistake, but I'm happy that you understood what I was saying. :-)

I think this is a great development, I really look forward to Pixar produced Marvel comics

I'm sorry, but I don't see how or why Disney will mix Pixar with Marvel or form some collaboration between the two.

You need to recognize the value of Marvel as a stand alone company. Forget Disney and Pixar. Obviously someone at Disney sees the value of this company and feels they have the expertise to grow the value of Marvel beyond where it's already at.

If you fail to see how the best computer animation company in the world making a movie using Marvel characters is not an amazing idea, then I cant help you.

You seem to forget that this isn't a done deal since they have to go through anti-trust laws as well as the shareholders. The shareholders can turn Disney down Because Marvel does have enough characters to have spin-offs for many decades to come. Chances are Disney sees an opportunity to have an overedge majority of the characters from both the Marvel universe and disney's own creations.

Anti-trust isn't even remotely an issue here from my layman's perspective.

Marvel's shareholders aren't going to balk---the offer price was a significant premium over share price.

On the perpetual agreement for Islands of Adventure to continue to use the Marvel characters...

My guess is that they are licensed to use what they have now, BUT, if they were to create a new attraction or a new show involving those characters they would need a separate agreement for those. My guess is even if Hulk and Spiderman and Doctor Doom's Freefall are all covered right now that they could not expand on it or replace said rides with something else should the rides wear out. That might even be a problem for something as small as a modification to an existing ride, say a new program for Spiderman or a reprofiling of Hulk to fit the new movies being made.

I don't pretend to know anything about their current agreement and all of that might be covered, but my guess is that it isn't.

I think Eric is the one person here who, in my opinion, seems to actually understand what Disney is doing and what this really means.

This is an extension of the kind of thing that started when Disney created Touchstone Pictures specifically so they could release up-rated movies. Disney is a media empire, and the Marvel purchase is all about Disney becoming (through acquisition) a dominant player in an area of commercial media (and its associated audience) where it does not currently operate. This isn't about extending Disney's influence over all media; this is about Disney making sure that it *owns* a little bit of everything.

Miramax is probably a good model to look at. Marvel these days is really good at what it does, and it has some tremendous properties to exploit. Disney knows this (of course; that's why they bought Marvel, and that's why they are paying $4,000,000,000 for it). They aren't going to put mouse ears on the Incredible Hulk. Marvel is much too valuable for them to screw it up. Marvel is going to stay Marvel, I doubt that we will see much evidence of it in any of the Disney parks, and six months from now, 90% of the population won't have a clue that Disney owns Marvel. Marvel will show up as a profitable business unit in the Disney annual report, but other than that...as long as it continues to be a profitable business unit...Marvel is going to do its own thing. After all, that's why Disney bought them.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Yay.. Now I get to go back through all the posts and figure out which person is Eric.

I'm very curious though to see what Disney will do to "right" Marvel's film business. Because Marvel went whoring themselves out to other studios, they don't have the kind of control I suspect they'd like to have on certain properties (especially Spiderman). That's why Marvel finally opened its own studio, when it realized that self-financing their films would yield a bigger piece of the pie. Now they've essentially got their own distribution as well, but again, they've got deals in place with Paramount that will take them through several films.

With a bit of time to digest, I suspect that the movie studio angle and the missing demographic of young adult males were the biggest spurs while the Universal deal may have slowed down the negotiations a bit due to investigating the contracts. Considering how well the Spiderman ride has been received, I'd imagine they'd want to keep the licensing deal and not weaken the name before they're ready to start working on integrating the characters into their parks in a few years.

Disney's movies outside of the Pixar films and the Princess and Fairies related dvds don't appear to have made much impact with the general public recently. At least outside of Bolt, I can't recall the names of any Disney branded movie in the last few years that made much of an impression on me, and even then, Bolt is known to me only because of articles discussing Lasseter's influence on the development of the film. Note that I am clearly ignoring Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers films since they aim at the younger crowd and not the general audience I'm trying to put myself into.

I've forgotten where I've read it now, but I recall that some of the blame is the marketing, where even Ratatouille and Wall-E had pretty lame advertising and was only on my radar because of the Pixar name. The advertising should make you interested and give you a nice feel for the movie. Kung Fu Panda advertised heavily the humor in the film and the action and it paid off by coming in fairly close to Wall-E's total. Madagascar 2 had a better advertising scheme by promoting the little jokes and the body function humor in the commercials than Bolt's advertising that I saw, and from all accounts, Bolt should have easily won over the audience and become a huge hit instead of fading away.

Still, having the Marvel characters is still a bit of a gamble if the franchises aren't done right by the time they get ready to make a push. As long as Iron Man and the whole Avengers lineup work out, those characters will be fine, and hopefully repairing the damage the last X-Men (and to a lesser extent SpiderMan) movie did will solidify their investment. I do hope they've taken what they've learned from getting Pixar and working with the creative groups there and apply it to Marvel. We'd be winners all around in that case.

ridemcoaster said:
Yay.. Now I get to go back through all the posts and figure out which person is Eric.

Lol...

I know it's bad forum etiquette to just post an lol, but this really did make me lol. It needed to be acknowledged. :)

Thrillfan - Disney doesn't own any part of the Spiderman or Xmen (including spinoffs like Deadpool) film franchises. The rights to those were licensed out before Marvel realized the money printer they had in their hands. There's no way for them to "right" those franchises until the agreements are up and they can be brought back under the Marvel studio umbrella.

Besides, the people who actually care about those (and the way that some of the stories were butchered to fit Hollywood) realize that they weren't Marvel studio films and that the blame lay with Fox, not Marvel. The non-comic fan who saw them as action movies really could care less that Deadpool was essentially castrated for Wolverine.

Disney/Marvel Synergy