In a deal that’s apparently been in the works for a while, Disney has agreed to buy Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion. The deal, which still needs to be approved by shareholders and has to get anti-competition approval, values each Marvel share at around $50 dollars (Disney is offering $30 in cash and 0.745 Disney shares for every Marvel share).
Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter commented, “Disney is the perfect home for Marvel’s fantastic library of characters given its proven ability to expand content creation and licensing businesses. This is an unparalleled opportunity for Marvel to build upon its vibrant brand and character properties by accessing Disney’s tremendous global organization and infrastructure around the world.” Alternatively you can read that as, “I’m rich, I’m rich, I’m so frigging rich it’s unbelievable!”, as Perlmutter is also Marvel’s biggest shareholder and the deal represents excellent value for him (he will be staying and overseeing the company after the merger though, despite his windfall).
The deal gives Disney control of Marvel’s more than 5,000 characters, including Spider-man, the X-Men, Fantastic Four, Captain America, Iron Man and more. Although the press release announcing the deal doesn’t specifically address how it might affect the numerous Marvel movies currently in development, presumably it won’t affect characters whose film rights have already been sold to other studios, such as Spider-man (Sony), X-Men and Fantastic Four (Fox), or the Marvel movies that have pre-existing distribution deals with rival studios, such as Iron Man 2 (Paramount).
It’ll be interesting to see what happens though, as one of Marvel’s strengths with its films in recent years has been its ability to spread its properties out all over Hollywood, so that it can get far more movies out per year than would be feasible with a single studio. DC Comics meanwhile has always seemed slightly hobbled by the fact it was part of the same company as Warner Bros, which holds all the film rights for its major characters. This has resulted in DC falling behind its main rival in the quantity of its characters its been able to get on screen (indeed the series it has going, such as Batman and Super-man, seem to creep between instalments at a snail’s pace). Presumably with Disney owning Marvel, more and more of the company’s superhero movies will be coming out under their banner (which will be good news for Disney, as they’re the only major studio at the moment without a major superhero franchise of their own).
With Marvel currently overseeing the numerous movies that will lead up to The Avengers, which is one of the most complex and expensive projects in film history, we’ll just have to hope the new deal doesn’t throw a spanner in the works and we still get the superhero films we’ve been promised. It would appear though that there may be some big changes coming for comic book fans as Disney tries to make the most of it new investment.