70 billion dollars and what really do they have to show for it?
The purchase gave them an insane amount of debt so they immediately laid off a lot of former fox employees and recently laid off 7000 employees to save them 5 billion.
They also haven’t done much of anything with the Fox catalog.
Most of the new 20th century films were unceremoniously slapped onto Hulu streaming.
- Hellraiser 2022
- Prey
- New Mutants
- No Exit
- Barbarian
- Boston Strangler
- Crater
And more were all put on streaming and forgotten. Some of these movies were pretty good and could have made some money in theaters. I really liked Barbarian myself and Prey got a ton of praise.
What exactly did they get that was worth 70 billion? Avatar? The Simpsons? They could have just licensed those for Disney+ and saved a ton of money. Most of Fox’s properties don’t fit Disney. What are they even going to do with Alien, Predator, and Planet of the Apes? If Prey is any indication they aren’t interested in putting them in theaters.
Before someone says X-Men what the hell have they even done with them? Some lame cameos. I’ll never forgive them for the quicksilver gag in Wandavision. They got beat bad by Fox in the who has the cooler quicksilver so they make him a dick joke. Great.
They aren’t going to do anything with the X-Men anytime soon. The 3rd Deadpool movie seems to be the only thing even cooking and that seems to be more because Ryan Reynolds is pushing it. If you’re an X-Men fan you must be disappointed. Remember when we had an X-Men movie about every year? Say goodbye to those and Alien, Predator, Planet of the Apes.
FX seems to be doing alright but all to adult for Disney so to Hulu it goes. Why did they make a big deal out of Disney+ anyway? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have one app? Put it all on Hulu. Why are their two apps with very different interfaces for one company?
Now that Disney is losing money in streaming and with recent flops I think this deal needs to be scrutinized more. Blame Capitalism or streaming mania but I have to say even from a business standpoint it makes no sense at all.
What do you think? Was this the beginning of the end for Disney’s box office dominance? A bad play to kill Netflix? Or is Disney planning something that will take years to bear fruit?
I think you are expecting changes too soon. X-Men will likely be joining the MCU: Deadpool 3 and Fantastic Four are both upcoming. The MCU is announced though 2027, so the earliest we might see X-Men is 2028.
Disney has future plans to roll Hulu content into Disney. The reason it hasn’t is that Disney does not own Hulu outright: it owns 2/3 of Hulu, and Comcast owns 1/3. In January 2024, both companies have the option to force Disney to buy Comcast’s shares, which will then give Disney 100% ownership.
Mergers are not magic things that make everything change the next day. It takes years. My company merged with another 8 years ago and only in the past year have we lined up our pay schedule and rebranded all our offices. Disney only bought Fox 4 years ago. It might be another decade before everything is finalized.
Sure things take time but look how quickly they moved on Star Wars and Marvel. They made a deal with Sony for Spider-Man and then he’s immediately in Civil War. I just don’t understand the hold up. Also I don’t think Deadpool is going to bridge the gap between Marvel and Fox X-Men. I don’t think Disney world use a R rated comedy for that. I think a lot of people expected Multiverse of madness to bring the X-Men in and when it didn’t happen they were disappointed. Marvel seems to be running out of steam if I were them I’d shove in as many X-Men as I could.
Yes, Marvel and Lucasfilm seem to have been easier acquisitions, good point. And add Pixar to that.
Fox is another story, I believe. 1) it is much larger, just going by the pirchase price. 2) doesn‘t fox also own a lot of distribution, tv channels, and more? Marvel and Lucasfilm never had their own distribution.
Also, to comment on the OP: if you name the purchase price, you should also name the annual revenue and profit of Fox pre-merger. That should put things in perspective.
Yes, they rented a character to use him in a movie and then made that movie. That’s how that works. For Star Wars, they bought it specifically so they could make Star Wars movies, and it still took 3 years.
Neither are the same as buying a major company with multiple TV channels, international broadcasters, and partial stakes in 2 other companies. The merger itself took 1.5 years.
And then after the merger, they still had existing contracts to deal with, FOX films that were still releasing under the old studio name, TV network contracts, etc.
So yeah, Deadpool 3 is coming out 5 years after the merger, which is two years longer than it took them to make a movie after buying Lucasfilm, which was a way way way smaller acquisition. And there they were reciting an existing franchise, while Deadpool appears to be the only FOX franchise they intend to continue. Kind of explains itself.