Disney Buys Marvel For $4B

whisper_jeff writes "Disney has announced they will be purchasing Marvel. 'Building on its strategy of delivering quality branded content to people around the world, The Walt Disney Company has agreed to acquire Marvel Entertainment, Inc. in a stock and cash transaction, the companies announced today.'"

Comments

Bye bye marvel...

[CRiMSON]

It was a nice run while you had it, Enjoy doing princess disney stories forever more now.

Re:Bye bye marvel...

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I worked for Disney for 5 years and they're not likely to change a winning formula.

The beauty of Disney's model is that they sell to six years olds; six year olds with literally no memory and no experience of having seen their product before despite its being over 50 years old. It's as if Disney, as a company, is selling into a market with mass collective amnesia. They never need to innovate.

Re:Bye bye marvel...

[jean-guy69]

Touchstone Pictures is nothing more than a brand of Disney.
Under this brand, Disney produced :

Starship Troopers, Revelations, Ladykillers, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , Apocalypto, The Prestige,The Royal Tenenbaums,Dead Poets Society,The Nightmare Before Christmas ..

See the complete list.

Re:Bye bye marvel...

[mqduck]

Trust me, Grimms Fairy Tales are much better in their original form

I don't generally care for Disneyfication of classic stories, but in the case of the Grimm's fairy tales, it's difficult to say that the stories are better or worse left in their original hardcore form.

The original stories weren't so much supposed to be entertainment as moral and cautionary tales. Back in the day, the message to kids of Little Red Riding Hood was very relevant: don't wander around in the woods by yourself or you'll get eaten by a fucking wolf.

Re:Bye bye marvel...

[mollog]

I'm not sure but you seem to be agreeing with me. Disney was and is mainstream Amerika; conformist, sanitized, shallow.

Comics (Graphic Novels) were very non-conformist; sensational, graphic, violent, and celebrating the anti-hero. I have no doubt Disney was aware of Graphic Novels, but their approach to medias was orthogonal to the approach by Marvel, et al, and Disney did not seem to try to compete with the themes of comics.

For Disney to now take ownership of those very sources of alternative media is to see that alternative media co-opted, and to lose access to those themes.

A good fit

[KingSkippus]

Marvel... The company that sued NCsoft for making a game in which superheroes could be constructed because some of them could be made to look like Marvel characters? And then it turned out that the most egregious violators were actually Marvel employees?

Sounds like a good fit to me, I'm sure the companies will be really happy with each other.

Batman and Porky Pig

[tepples]

Thank god Batman is DC comics.

DC Comics is part of Time Warner. So is Porky Pig.

Re:great!

[CodeBuster]

Yes, except now Disney-fied and sanitized (look no blood!) to assure parents that little johnny won't be lead astray by those no-good comic books. If you thought that the Comics Code Authority was bad, just wait until Disney sinks their claws into the Marvel brands. I do not see how this can be considered to be good for comics in general and Marvel in particular. In fact, it will probably hasten the decline of American comics in favor of edgier manga and graphic novels coming out of Japan (a trend which was already clearly evident even before this latest deal).

Re:GREAT!

[Philip K Dickhead]

The great suckage.

I buy no Disney. They are cultural programming of the lowest order. You want a rotten child? Let them watch Disney channel 2 hours a day.

If you could contrive propaganda aimed at undermining basic human values, specifically that of respect, you could do no better than to come up with this garbage. It is particularly detrimental to the child / parent relationship - always portrayed as a way to manipulate or deceive the old buffoons.

Disney is death.

And they all lived FOREVER...

[Uteck]

Now we can rest assured that the Marvel characters will never fall into the public domain and live as part of the Disney brand for the rest of time.

Re:Fox and New Corp

[Mix Master Nixon]

Did you SEE the movies Fox made based on Marvel properties? Other than the first two X-MEN films, it's been wall to wall dogshit. If Fox had bought Marvel instead of Disney, the pathetic whining and moaning from people who don't know what the hell they're talking about would be far worse and far more justifiable. Fox never met the property that they couldn't micro-mismanage into oblivion. They're the ones who hired Brett Ratner to make X-MEN 3. Disney will let Marvel do what Marvel wants to do because Disney likes money. Interference with Marvel would poison the brand and with it Disney's massive investment in it. Disney releases of Marvel films will be through a subsidiary company, most likely Touchstone.

Last time Marvel was owned by a movie studio it was the short lived post-Roger Corman incarnation of New World Pictures. This couldn't possibly turn out any worse than that did.

Also, Marvel/Pixar = WIN.