I’m going to go on record to say this is a bad development for entertainment and, to be a tad melodramatic, society. Media companies are already too powerful. There should be more of them, not less. And Disney is already throwing its weight around. They strong armed theaters into a bad deal to exhibit The Last Jedi by taking a bigger cut of the proceeds and forcing them to keep the movie extra weeks. Smaller theaters had to say no because to keep the same movie as long as Disney wanted was not possible.
In a more sinister move, they tried black balling the LA Times because it had written a story the company didn’t like. Yeah, I don’t care what dream cross overs this makes possible, it is bad news.
I don’t think that is true, and in any case it’s irrelevant. Do you think that Disney is buying Fox for stuff that is fifty or seventy years old? They’re not; they want the recent stuff (The Simpsons, The X-Men movies, Fantastic Four, etc.) and that stuff would be under copyright with or without the recent changes.
In principle I’d be agin it anyway, but I could compromise my principles to see Fox News have to meet the Disney standards which are at the opposite end of the fantasy spectrum.
It’s definitely true that Disney has had a large lobbying presence regarding copyright laws and their efforts have helped keep Mickey Mouse (and other properties) out of the public domain.
I imagine that Snowboarder Bo means that consolidating more media under a corporation with that much (arguably anti-consumer) legal sway isn’t a great thing.
There’s a dispiriting number of people I’ve seen saying “Man, this consolidation isn’t good but, you know, X-Men and Marvel!”
It will be difficult for Disney to manage such a sprawling conglomerate. Expect further inefficiencies in an industry notorious for crooked accounting.
But Disney will be able to stand up to the media distributors. Because they will be a media distributor themselves. So it’s a net win for shareholders: Disney/Fox should be able to extract a greater portion of the consumer dollar due to greater market power, as opposed to a superior product.
This is why there are anti-trust laws. This is why some of the greatest conservative legal minds were so intent in undermining the same. They have been mostly successful over the past 40 years.
Aye; that’s about it. Disney has already demonstrated that their goal is to make money off their intellectual properties and that it will utilize the legal system to ensure that those IP remain the property of the corporation in perpetuity. How is it a good idea to allow that corporation to acquire IP not of it’s own creation, knowing that they will now seek to control that in perpetuity as well.
Imagine if Shakespeare’s family was exerting control over his plays for all the past 400 years; how would that be a good thing for the world? Now imagine that they had the money to buy all the plays written up until this moment, and they’ll exert control ovler them for at least another 400 years. Why should we as a society allow that?
ETA: I don’t see the possible negatives, even if only partially reached, as being outweighed by any possible “Simpsons in Goofyland w/special guest Spider-man” productions.
On the one hand, I’m happy to see companies that have done a good job of creating art acquire the ability to make more good art. On the other hand, I really wish that there were more such companies, and it’s getting harder and harder for anyone else to compete even if they tried.
Does anyone really want the Fantastic Four movie rights? It would be amusing if they tried to reduce antitrust concerns by spinning off the FF rights into a separate company. It would be like one of the “bad banks” tasked with holding toxic assets after the financial crisis.
Yeah, this sends a chill through my bones. It’s not like Disney’s bound by the First Amendment and freedom of speech. If they own all the media, no one could speak against them without being stifled, unless they were standing on a street corner with a bullhorn. This is double plus ungood, if you get my reference.
The articles I’m seeing suggest that a big motivation here is to bulk Disney up to compete against Netflix and Amazon, whose streaming services are seen as serious competition for Disney’s broadcast, cable and other channels. (I’m a little skeptical, since as big as Netflix is, it still doesn’t have nearly the reach of the big Hollywood players. For one thing, I’ve heard that Netflix has 100 million subscribers, but that’s worldwide. How many people have access to Disney programs via cable and satellite services around the world? I suspect it’s many more.)
I would think it would be a bigger antitrust issue for Disney to buy the Fox broadcast network than for it to buy Fox News, given that it already owns ABC. But it sounds like Murdoch never intended to sell either the Fox network or Fox News.
