It’s official folks, from 12:02 am Eastern Time on 20 March 2019 (about 4 hours from now) Disney will have acquired a the whole of 21st Century Fox properties for a sum you and I can’t even begin to fathom it’s so large (not, Googol large but still). I look at this and I have somewhat mixed feelings about this
On the one hand, yes I am very happy that all the Marvel properties that Fox had licensed back in the late 1990’s are now returning back to Marvel studios so we can now look forward to seeing The X-Men and the Fantastic 4 interact with the Avengers. I’m also slightly nonplussed at the fact that shows like The Simpsons, The X-Files (obviously), Bones or Buffy the Vampire Slayer are now part of the “Disney Family”. Fox has a lot of properties which are not exactly family friendly.
But on the other hand, I can’t help but see this as a giant fish being eaten by an even more monstrous fish and I wonder how long it will be until there is just one enormously large corporation to provide all the entertainment you would need. How long until Disney acquire Warner Bros? Imagine Marvel and DC under one house! What about Paramount? That would put Star Trek and Star Wars under the same house. I’m having visions of a dystopian future where the world is ran by a conglomerate of giant corporations, one for each major sector: Disney for Entertainment, Apple for tech (circa 2025 after they acquire Microsoft and Google can no longer compete), Shell for energy (or whoever will be savvy enough to catch the renewables train fast enough leaving the competition to burn in oil barrels), Monsanto for food (and you thought this was scary?) … if you’ve not seen the canadian dystopian Sci-Fi show Continuum, this is the exact premise.
I’m sure there will be plenty of good things coming out of this deal but I really don’t know when this is going to stop… See Disney’s press release below:
