Shareholders have approved Disney’s purchase of 21st Century Fox. According to Deadline, “the whole procedure took maybe 10 minutes” with 99% of the shareholders for both companies approving the acquisition of Fox assets.
The press release states that the acquisition will bring Disney the film and TV studio assets held by 21st Century Fox, along with cable networks FX and National Geographic. Disney will also gain Fox’s 30% stake in Hulu, which raises questions as to the future of Disney’s planned 2019 streaming service.
Via Disney Chairman and CEO Bob Iger, “We’re incredibly pleased that shareholders of both companies have granted approval for us to move forward, and are confident in our ability to create significant long-term value through this acquisition of Fox’s premier assets.”
Marvel Studios and Kevin Feige have not yet released any statement regarding intentions to integrate the X-Men/Deadpool/Fantastic Four and Marvel cinematic universes. However, barring any last-second regulatory challenges to the acquisition, there are now no legal or financial hurdles preventing such an integration.
Which means, among other things, Tony Stark now has a new big purple space guy to worry about.
Maybe next, in a bit of irony, they’ll buy Comcast[1], so we can finally have a real Planet Hulk movie[2].
[1] …who tried to buy Disney back in 2004. Could you imagine!?
[2] Hulk movie rights are currently held in the iron grips of Universal, a Comcast company.
Comcast successfully trolled Disney on this one. They hiked up Disney’s initial bid of 54B so Disney would have to pay more, almost 20B more now.
This also puts Disney’s initial acquisition of Marvel for 4B to shame. Many thought that was outrageous at the time.
If Disney had only bought the Marvel stuff, then that would’ve been fine, I guess. But they’ve bought much more than that, and I can’t celebrate a now even larger corporate media behemoth broadcasting across world culture.
Sign me up for a Fantastic Four/Guardians of the Galaxy movie please!
@3/Archie123: I agree. Unifying Marvel is fine, the rest is just more monopolization and I hope the FTC (or whoever it is) requires Disney to divest some of the other stuff.
Honestly, though, I’m not sure how I feel about folding the Fox movie characters into the MCU. Where the X-Men are concerned, I’d actually be happier if they stayed in their own separate universe, since theirs is really the only long-running, successful cinematic superhero franchise other than the MCU, and it has its own well-established identity and (very loose and mutable) continuity that I’d like to see continue. Although I’d be fine with a interdimensional crossover, Arrowverse-style.
As for the Fantastic Four, I’m ambivalent. On the one hand, after how badly their previous movies misfired, it’s reassuring to see them in the hands of creators who are more likely to get them right. On the other hand, the FF work best as the well-established veterans and spiritual leaders of the Marvel superhero community, basically the role that Iron Man, Cap, and Black Widow have played in their absence. Having them just show up as relative novices — or, Stan and Jack forbid, in yet another origin-story movie — wouldn’t really capture their best qualities. So it’s hard to see how to make it work.
Also, what will this mean for Fox’s Marvel TV shows? I’m still ticked off at how the excellent The Spectacular Spider-Man animated series got prematurely axed when Marvel got back the Spidey TV rights from Sony (in exchange for Sony keeping the movie rights, or something like that) and replaced it with their own inferior Ultimate Spider-Man. Now, I’m probably pretty much done with Legion after the mess its second season became, so I wouldn’t miss it, but The Gifted is excellent and just getting started.
I have a longstanding suspicion that Marvel has been planning this under the table for a LONG time, and seeding hints of a shared universe all over the place. For example:
1. The Asgardian robot in Thor looks extremely similar to the future Sentinels in Days of Future Past. Who gave the plans to the government? (Loki?)
2. A lot of Ultron’s dialogue about “evolution” and so on takes on a double meaning if you imagine that, in his trip through the Internet, he’s been influenced by the Brotherhood of Mutants site on the dark web. And then he. . .allies with Magneto’s biological son and daughter? (Elizabeth Olsen did slip up at a con and call the Scarlet Witch a mutant.)
3. On the other side, Deadpool totally lays the groundwork for the conflicting origin stories about the Witch by putting it into the larger cinematic story that mutation can be inflicted by torture.
I have lots more, but I’m at work. Think about it, though. It would be very smart politics by Marvel to have been planning this long-term and minimizing the impact of an out-of-control group of conflicting canons. (And on that note, also very smart to expand Spider-Man in a direction that implicitly includes the multiverse. I’m wondering if we might also see flashes of alternate universes as Easter eggs in Infinity War Part II or whatever it’s called.)
@5 I gave up part way through season 2 of Legion, it didn’t have anything I liked about season 1, notably the creepy horror elements. I loved season 1’s Shadow King and the World’s Angriest Boy in the World.
I just hope Marvel branches out with the introduction of Fox’s assets, and doesn’t just cookie cutter all of it into their MCU formula. I’ve lost interest in most MCU movies, and have realized that I don’t even care about the stories. I basically gauge my enjoyment from how colorful, exciting, and humorous they manage to be. Age of Ultron was the beginning of the end for me.
-5-
I agree. Despite it being under the same studio, I’m not sure how well the X-Men would fit in the MCU at this point. Besides, I like it to be its own universe, full of social commentary about racism and lots of other -isms, where they can tell their own stories without constantly dealing with what all those other Marvel characters are doing.
Marvel could do a science-off with Reed, Tony, and Bruce. A story of the explorer, the engineer, and the physicist that incidentally introduces the explorer’s family. Definitely no more origin stories. And you could throw in a Hulk/Thing meet-cute fight.
One option is to bring Galactus and/or the Celestials to Earth. Use a truly giant Worldship and skyscraper sized Galactus.
Also, as ever, I’d like to see Earth’s Nova introduced.
I’m 100% for ending the X-movies run, and starting them fresh in the MCU. While I’ve enjoyed some of the movies, and there have been some gems (Logan, X2, Days of Future Past), there were a lot of bad decisions, bad casting(not counting Patrick Stewart, the Magnetos, and a few others) and bad movies. I can’t wait to see a new Wolverine in an Avengers or Spiderman movie, or Deadpool side-kicking for an unwilling Dr. Strange. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if they used Infinity War part 2 to do it. You can do all kinds of things with the reality gem.
@10/REEM: That’s kinda what I like about the X-Men franchise, though — they make mistakes, but then they keep on plugging and manage to redeem themselves with better movies. It’s kind of an encouraging meta-message there, that you can come back from a failure and it doesn’t have to be the end of the world. Very Marvel.
@10. REEM: Maybe they could add a credits scene for Avengers 4, but it’s already in production and the deal hasn’t been finalized. Tom Holland has already spilled the beans about Doctor Strange having to spout jargon about the quantum realm. Supposedly, we’ll get alternate worlds at some point, too. But Marvel would really have to scramble with casting to fold in new characters so quickly.
@11: I can understand that, but for me it doesn’t outweigh wanting to see the full Marvel lineup in the same universe. Maybe it’s because i grew up in the nineties when the X-Men seemed to start becoming much more involved in the rest of the Marvel Universe, but it doesn’t seem complete without them.
@12: Right, they definitely wouldn’t be a part of the plot of the movie, but I can imagine several ways to use the present situation to either incorporate the existing characters later or plant the seed for mutants to start showing up. Like the Scarlet Witch getting her hands on the reality gem and pulling a reverse House of M.
I prefer to keep the mutants and the other supers separate. I never really understood how could people at the same time admire the Fantastic Four or the Avengers but hate and try to outlaw the mutants.
A: Hey that guy just flew! Let’s arrest and be bigoted to that dirty mutant!
B: But I got my powers when a radioactive mosquito bit me, not through mutation.
A: Well, that’s OK then. Can you give me an authograph, Mosquito Man?
@14/Ryamano: Bigotry tends to be arbitrary. Historically, the same white people who have hated, oppressed, and murdered those who were born with even slightly dark skin have simultaneously admired and celebrated white people with rich, dark suntans. To them, whether you were born with the trait or not was a critical difference.
More to the point, the fear of mutants is that they aren’t just individuals who happened to get superpowers — they’re an entire species (never mind how a bunch of individuals with radically different genetic attributes can all be a single species — it’s an allegory). So they have the potential to replace Homo sapiens in the same way modern humans replaced the Neanderthals (supposedly, although it now appears we interbred with Neanderthals rather than murdering them all). That’s why they’re seen as an existential threat in a way that someone who got superpowers from a lab accident or a magic amulet is not. Racism is often based in the fear of being outnumbered and replaced, which is why racists often characterize those they hate as prolific breeders, and also why racist demagogues so frequently demonize immigration.
Of course, the flaw in that theory is that superheroes who get their powers through experimentation or accident sometimes pass their genetic alterations on to their children, which makes the children mutants. For instance, Franklin and Valeria Richards, or Mayday Parker in the alternate-future Spider-Girl continuity. So in the long term, it’s often a moot distinction. But since we’re dealing with bigotry and xenophobia, careful logical consideration doesn’t often enter into it.
I know it may have been pointing to something else from the comics, but there were a couple lines toward the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp that sounded suspiciously like setting up for the idea of mutants without nailing it down/committing before the deal was dry.
I know every is talking about Marvel, but does this mean Disney now has the rights back to A New Hope?
The American govt has already approved this subject to conditions that Disney agreed to, they aren’t taking the sports stuff and other things as per the government request, but basically all of the non sports entertainment assets, which is fine. Maybe some of those tragically cancelled Fox TV shows we all loved can be rebooted.
@18/DougL: I thought the deal was that the FOX Network and Fox’s other TV assets would have to be sold off to someone else, because Disney already owns ABC and thus couldn’t own a second major network under anti-trust laws. (Which is something that slipped my mind when I wrote comment #5.)
I can’t be happy about this. The X-Men always work best in the comics when they’re shunted off into their own little corner of the Marvel universe, for one thing. The whole “Humanity fears certain people with super powers but not others” thing is just asinine in a comics universe as large as 616 is now. It worked in the 60’s when there were only a couple dozen superheroes – total – running around but now? It’s just silly.
But more importantly, this merger means we’ll never see risky movies like Black Panther, Ant-Man, Captain Marvel or Doctor Strange again. Marvel Studios is limited to three films per year – possibly four, if Pixar isn’t putting out a movie in a given year – because they can’t step on other Disney subsidiary release windows. From now on, it’s Spider-Man, Avengers (team), X-Men (team), Wolverine, Deadpool, and Fantastic Four. That’s it. Throw in a bankable solo Avenger or X-Men flick so they can periodically space out the core six by three years instead of every two, but the days of them taking a chance on something goofy like Guardians of the Galaxy are over.
@20: I don’t believe in the concept of stepping on release windows. It’s perfectly feasible for a well-run studio to pump out multiple films within the same timeframe. Same applies with competing studios. Both Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films were released within a month of each other, both epic fantasy entries, and both were box-office hits. There’s no reason for Marvel to avoid releasing a blockbuster film at the same time as a Pixar entry. Case in point, Incredibles 2 didn’t hurt Ant-Man and the Wasp at all.
If people are willing to watch these films at once, they will. Besides, if there are less people going to the movies, it’s because of home-based streaming options, and those people won’t be enticed back to theatres because of a more spaced-out release schedule.
@21/Eduardo: My concern about the merger is not a matter of release windows or scheduling. The advantage of having multiple studios making Marvel movies at the same time is that it meant you could get more Marvel movies per year. If Marvel Studios tries to boost its output to compensate for Fox no longer making separate movies, that means they’d have to split their focus and resources more, and that might hurt the quality of each individual film. So it might come down to either fewer films per year or weaker films all around.
@22/Christopher: That’s definitely a possibility, and it could affect overall quality. Plus, at least under Fox, the X-Men films have been done on a project by project basis, never adhering to a need to develop some planned arc. This has allowed them to be more organic than the Marvel Studios entries.
While I guess it could be cool, I agree that at a point the universe becomes too crowded. I like that the X-Men have their own (loose as it may be) continuity.
Regarding the fear of mutants and how that would play into things like fears of being outnumbered, or just fears of people with powers (regardless of how they got them) – maybe that could still be rolled into similar plots like attempting oversight after what happened at Sokovia, etc. The seeming emergence of a new ‘species’ might just be more fuel on that fire.
Disney is buying 21st Century Fox (formerly 20th Century Fox). That company has a TV production division (which Disney gets), but not the Fox Network, Fox News, or any of the other TV networks like the Big Ten Network, FS1 and FS2, FX or FXx. If those networks produce their own tv shows, those aren’t properties Disney will be buying. Only 21st Century Fox’s TV division, movie division, and distribution. The Murdochs keep everything else. So, what this means for FOX’s Marvel shows depends on who the production company is.
@17:
Disney already owned A New Hope. What they didn’t control was the distribution rights. For that or any of the OT. Disney will acquire the distribution rights for A New Hope now, which means we will likely finally get a restored Blu-ray of the original theatrical release we all pretend we remember.
I kind of hope that Marvel either keeps the mutants separate from the MCU, or reboots the mutants entirely as a new development in the MCU, and we get to start over with the original X-Men team.
One way to bring the FF into the MCU, and have them be an older, experienced group, is to do something similar to what the comics are doing now. The FF have been off in the cosmos on a long voyage of exploration, long enough that they are thought by some to be dead, but now they are returning home. Their origin could be rooted back in the days when the original Ant Man and Wasp were operating, or perhaps when Captain Marvel’s origin took place.
Clearly the best way to get the different continuities to line up, would be for the X-men films to cast Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch (the character hasn’t been on screen in those films yet), and then at some point she can do the reverse of “no more mutants” and merge the two universes together.
Nice and tidy :)
@21/Eduardo: When I’m talking about stepping on release windows, it’s about stepping on their own, and the studios definitely do try not to do that as much as possible. I’m surprised that you think Pixar’s Incredibles 2 didn’t affect Marvel’s Ant-Man & The Wasp given the latter was released only 3 weeks after the former. AM&TW has grossed only $395M so far and is ranked 16/20 of Marvel’s movies. Incredibles 2 is the highest grossing animated movie in history. It’s hard for me to accept that Incredibles 2 didn’t affect AM&TW at all.
You also mentioned Harry Potter vs. Lord of the Rings, but those were released by competing studios – WB vs. New Line. You’re right that they were both hits, and I understand that it’s possible for more than one movie to be released at a time and for both to be a hit – but the point I’m making is that a single studio (or in this case, subsidiaries of the same company) are risk averse. They don’t like to put their own movies up against each other at the box office.
I agree with you about the rise of streaming and premium content at home being a massive reason people aren’t going to the movies as much anymore. But another reason is the high cost of going to the movies, beyond ticket prices (which are actually pretty reasonable). And when it costs a lot to go to the movies, spacing out releases actually does help mitigate risk for studios.
@20 danielmclark, re: sticking to safe superhero teams vs. goofy experiments – You’re neglecting one factor: finite actor contracts.
Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Evans, et al won’t be around forever (paycheck inflation, actor’s desire to do something else), and there are already signs that the long-term plan by Marvel Studios is to groom new faces to ease into headline positions — not necessarily characters, but archetypes who serve certain roles (Financing, Gadgets, Brawn, Young-eager, Cosmic, etc.). The MCU may have already recast Bruce Banner twice and Rhodey once, but if they want to, they’ve got an inbuilt excuse to introduce new characters rather than recast existing ones or transfer the mantle (e.g., Sam Wilson changing from Falcon to Captain America).
You’re also much more limited, if you’re releasing movies, in how much story you can actually tell — each film is, what, a full year or more of production, and contains an amount of story equivalent to maybe, oh, two or three monthly issues of a comic? At the height of my comic collecting (circa 1993) there were probably 6+ separate X-Men titles coming out on a monthly basis, plus multiple Avengers books, FF, and, of course, most of the heroes had their solo titles as well. When you’re producing at that volume, it’s easier to have everybody in the same continuity but mostly off doing their own thing, just coming together for the occasional crossover.
@30/hoopmanjh: Comics these days are so decompressed that a movie would probably correspond to more like 6-8 monthly issues. Let’s see, for comparison, Marvel’s adaptations of the first two Star Wars movies ran 6 issues each while their Return of the Jedi adaptation ran 4 issues. And comics today tend to have fewer panels/words per page than comics back then.
@31/CLB — True; although the Blade Runner and Dragonslayer adaptations were more like 2-3 issues each. But I guess the point I was not actually making was that I don’t want the FF & X-Men folded into the existing MCU because I think the existing movies are already stretching the limits of how much cross-film continuity the movie market will bear.
@32/hoopmanjh: Yes, but any movie adaptation can be compressed to fit in a smaller number of pages. I picked the Star Wars adaptations because they were fairly thorough and not trimmed down for space, so they were a better basis for a comparison of movie length to comic book length.
“…I don’t want the FF & X-Men folded into the existing MCU because I think the existing movies are already stretching the limits of how much cross-film continuity the movie market will bear.”
As I think someone above already mentioned, it’s likely that Marvel is probably in the process of phasing out a number of its existing characters (as actors’ contracts run out and they age out of their roles) and bringing in new characters to take their place. So it’s not like the FF and/or the X-Men would be adding to the crowded universe alongside Iron Man, Thor, Cap, Hulk, and the rest. It seems likely that some of those first-generation characters will fade away and the focus will shift to Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Dr. Strange, Spidey, etc. So the FF or the X-Men could similarly be brought in as replacements rather than adding further to the crowding.
That said, my preference would still be for the X-Men to stay apart in their own universe.
@33/CLB — Yeah, I’d have an easier time accepting FF into the existing MCU, especially if they’re newcomers replacing some of the existing characters.
@33 – too bad most of those characters were Snaptured ;) (Although given precisely the reason you mention, that’s actually one of the meta-reasons I suspect it will be undone.)
@35/Lisamarie: We already know there are Spider-Man and Black Panther sequels in pre-production. Honestly, I found Infinity War underwhelming, in part because it was so obvious that most or all of the “shocking deaths” would be undone in the next movie. (Also just because using shocking death as a plot device loses its power if you just keep doing it over and over again within a mere two and a half hours.)
It didn’t have huge emotional resonance for me either. But us genre folk are jaded, especially if we read the original stories.
On a meta level, obviously much of this will be undone. The interesting part is how. Perhaps even who, if not everyone is restored. It may also be the last hurrah for one or more of the original Avengers.
For the general audience, those who don’t necessarily know there’s another Spidey coming, the sadness had a more powerful effect. Some people reported sobbing in the audience.
@37/Sunspear: It wasn’t just the deaths. It was also that there were just so many characters crammed in that there wasn’t room for much in the way of real character development or interaction, beyond a fairly superficial level. The one character the movie handled really well was Thanos.
X-Men is like Star Trek. Both are products of that ’60s pop sci-fi with lots of fun characters and action but also with a brain for social causes and human dignity. It’s something that still carries on today for both in some form, and for that reason I don’t think X-Men needs to be folded into anything else. When you have an ethos that bold and distinctive, you can easily stand on your own.
@38. CLB: They could’ve sub-titled it Thanos, but then the mass audience didn’t know who he was.
Just started re-watching it today and it holds up so far on a pacing level. I’m even interested to watch the bonus features. Surprising how much of it was either improvised or done on the fly. Setting the big battle in Wakanda was a big risk at the time it was shot, before BP became a mega-hit. The Panther actors had to fill in the directors about such things as battle cries.
I also watched Infinity War again recently, and what struck me was how often one character wanted another character to kill them/allow them to die, in order to to deny Thanos, (Loki/Thor at the start, Quill/Gamora, Dr Strange/Stark, and then Wanda/Vision). I just saw the same plot point (“You need to sacrifice me!”, “I can’t!”) coming up again and again, although of course Wanda and Thanos actually do go through with it.
I’m not sure it’ll ever be one of my favourite films, but I am impressed with how well they managed to give all the different characters a bit of screen time and plot given how many of them there are. So, more of a technical achievement than an emotional one.
I’m re-reading House of M right now and I think a similar storyline would be a great way to either merge the two (potenially three) universes or reboot the x-universe and fantastic four universe into the MCU.
I have been a Marvel comics fan from the beginning (and yes, that makes me a bit older than most current fans) and was glad when they started making the movies. I’ll have to admit that I stopped reading comics and have not kept up with all the new plots and characters of recent years. But the movies have mostly characters that I do remember fondly.
That said, I have friends who were not comic book fans when younger and while they have enjoyed the movies, they have also got really confused with the multitude of characters in each universe.
I think it has worked keeping the mutant universe separate from the MCU. Trying to combine them at this point would only make things more confusing and would be of no real benefit.