Disney buys Marvel Entertainment Inc. for a cool $4 billion dollars.
by Drew
The Walt Disney empire is to buy the superheroes stable Marvel Entertainment for $4bn (£2.5bn) in a star-studded Hollywood deal that unites family names such as Mickey Mouse with lucrative characters including Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and the X-Men.
Disney hopes to put Marvel’s 5,000 characters to work on its television channels and in video games, theme parks and movies. The agreed takeover is for a mixture of cash and stock, with Disney shares accounting for roughly 40% of the buyout price.
The tie-up unites two companies with similar business models – they both take characters which capture the popular imagination and promote them vigorously around the world on every possible media platform and through third-party licensing deals.
As a lifelong comic nut – my initial reaction to this was ‘oh fuck’ – like someone had stripped Marvel from all of it’s awesomeness.
But then I started to think of the theme-parks and the rides that Disney will come up with now that they own all of Marvel’s 5000 characters. Add to that, the fact that Disney has said that they won’t interfere with the Marvel characters, and I’m cool with it.
Not that Disney needed my approval anyway.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/9/2/
hahaha that’s good.
i personally think that this is great idea. solely for the fact that disney will eventually have some influence over marvel and slowly but surely marvel will lose whatever it is that makes them cool. i foresee this as being the end of wolverine and the gang. that’s a very bold statement to make, but i firmly believe it to be true.
by the way, i’m a DC elitist and so i’m sure i have no credibility on this matter.
DC??? Wow – Although Batman is great, Marvel is totally better than DC.
Like, totally.
Just wait until they unfreeze Walt’s brain….