Film at 11/The Hoard Potato: Disney Buys Marvel.

[athelind]

That headline again:

Disney. Buys. Marvel.

Tempting as it is to just follow that with "'Nuff said", I have to wonder....

• How will this affect Marvel Sudios and their ambitious "Avengers Cycle" movie plans?
  
• Will Disney cancel the Gemstone Comics license, and start releasing Disney titles using Marvel's production and banner?
  
• Conversely, will that matter if both companies continue to ignore newstand and grocery store distribution in favor of the hard-core fandom's boutique market?
  
• What does this mean for Kingdom Hearts and Capcom vs. Marvel?
  
• Will there be an even more vigorous crackdown on Marvel fanfic and games with "Character Creators" that let you "duplicate Marvel intellectual property", like City of Heroes and Champions Online?
  
• Will Howard return to his original character design? Will he turn out to hail from Duckburg? Will he lose his pants?

If this doesn't fall through, it'll bring a symmetry to the comics world: both major comics companies will be owned by massive global media juggernauts.

Strange days indeed.

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Comments

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Heck, I'm not even saying that setting the company up for a big-ticket buyout is somehow a BAD thing. It's a positive-sum game: the architect of Marvel's revival gets filthy rich, and the company gets a measure of financial stability that it honestly hasn't had since New World Cinema (hardly a financial powerhouse) sold it off in the '80s.

It's good for Disney, it's good for Marvel, it's good for Perlmutter. Yay!

On the other claw, is it good for US? One of the worst offenders in the copyright wars has suddenly gained control of yet ANOTHER chunk of modern folklore, much of which would already be in the public domain if the Mouse hadn't repeated pushed Congress to enact ever-more-damaging Copyright Extensions.

But that's a whole 'nother topic.

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

I doubt it'll mean that much in day-to-day operations of Marvel. As much as I might wish for a new editorial direction in the comics, you've already covered that Disney is no longer the Mouse and just another huge media corporation of which Disney just happens to be the brand label for the conglomerate. I seriously doubt that they have any intention of “dumbing down” anything and even if they do intervene it will probably a mere shift of the burden of editorial control over comics from one shoulder to the other. It wasn't like Marvel wasn't already a multi-billion dollar corporation. This is not a case of the little fish being swallowed by a big fish, but of an enormous fish being swallowed by a leviathan. Marvel has long had a lot of editorial control from on high.

Thinking about it, right now I think that Disney is clearly good at managing brands. It might actually be good for Marvel. It's the inverse of what the worriers are concerned about. They're worried that Disney will bring the Mouse's monolithic control to Marvel. But considering how well run Disney is . . . that might not be a bad thing. I think it is at least possible that Disney will be better at running Marvel, artistically, than Marvel ran itself. ;)

[athelind.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much my summary, too. The kvetching about copyright abuse is pretty abstract; the take-home message is that it won't have much impact at all on my regular dose of prepackaged corporate media consumption, and what impact it WILL have will be POSITIVE.

...oh, wait. I mostly read DC; it won't have much of an impact even in the worst-case scenario. ;)