Hell with that. SW Ep. IX will have Darth Homer and Bart the Jedi.
The popular reaction to this has been some of the most shameless consumerist bootlicking I’ve seen in awhile. It’s OK because my favorite action figures will fight on the big screen! Woohoo!
I can’t wait until CGI cartoons for kids have explicitly reactionary messages, as opposed to now, where it’s subtext.
ROFL!
There’s one advantage the merger may have…it might allow me to show Fox’s catalog of movies at the library where I work. Fox is one of the only studios our library’s public performance license doesn’t cover, and there are so many movies from Fox’s catalog, classic and current, that I’d like to show…the original Star Wars trilogy, The King and I and South Pacific for my summer musicals series, the new Murder on the Orient Express, tomorrow night’s TV musical version of A Christmas Story…
The licensing company tells me they’ll let me know if it turns out we’ll be allowed to show Fox’s catalog.
And the White House confirms that Rupert Murdoch received input from Donald Trump regarding this sale.
Insert your own punchline.
Maybe it won’t be as terrible as feared. Maybe it will be business as usual (unlikely, but maybe) but I think if your only thought about this is “Cool, now Iron Man can fight Wolverine in a movie” you have to readjust your priorities.
My apologies for the sloppiness of my writing. I saw copyright upstream and continued to use it.
Designs and characters are trademarked. The actual words and images and sounds and expression of ideas are subject to copyright.
The practical upshot is the same: immense legal battles over what is called copyright infringement, which is why Robin Thicke and Pharrell had to pay $7 million to the family of a man who died 33 years ago.
The secondary implication is that culture stagnates: when companies have large databases of everything that has been created that they own, they will have minions (likely automated) that will analyze new creations for possible infringement.
I recall reading a sci-fi story about this decades ago where this was a minor plot point: characters were writing music and finding out that everything they wrote violated copyright because it all contained elements of tunes they’d heard decades earlier.
Spider Robinson I believe. Maybe tied into Stardance.
Maybe you’ll find this Phil Greaves twitter thread funny too. Remember, folks: fun is bad.
Do I? No, I don’t think I do. Buyouts happen. Some companies fall, others rise. It’s how business works.
Oh my God…is he trolling? I pray to God he’s trolling. Otherwise, he’s off his meds.
Who the heck is Phil Greaves?
Either a great comedian or a raving nutbag.
Stuff can be two things!
Some of us nerds don’t want Disney and Marvel Studios to get the mutants and the FF back. Fox was actually doing some different and non-Disneyesque stuff with the properties, and not having the X-Men rights meant Marvel had to actually look at Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Thor, and Ant-Man as something they could adapt rather than as forgettable third-stringers. Marvel should lose adaptation rights more often.
This consolidation isn’t normal or healthy. Fox was doing fine financially.
[del]It’s called “The Melancholy of Elephants” as I recall.[/del]
That’s the one, thanks.
Spider. I should have known.
But then again, it’s more important to remember the story than the guy who wrote it 
And you’re sure of this how, exactly?