It is official:
The Walt Disney Company and Twenty-First Century Fox, Inc. (21st Century Fox) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement for Disney to acquire 21st Century Fox, including the Twentieth Century Fox Film and Television studios, along with cable and international TV businesses, for approximately $52.4 billion in stock (subject to adjustment).
[blah blah blah they’re totally doing a streaming service]
Immediately prior to the acquisition, 21st Century Fox will separate the Fox Broadcasting network and stations, Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, FS1, FS2 and Big Ten Network into a newly listed company that will be spun off to its shareholders.
Note that they’re not acquiring the news station. Mostly just the film and TV studios. And their libraries too, of course.
All of this, by the way, means that Hulu is now majority-owned by Disney. Apparently the Mouse is thinking of tossing the less kid-friendly material from Fox onto that service, so I guess that it’s probably time to think about subscribing to it, huh? Especially if Disney decides to pull all the Fox stuff it now owns out of Netflix and into its own sites.
Moe Lane
PS: This is now the time for the other networks and film studios to finally get off of their collective rears and start seriously thinking about combining their libraries into a collective streaming service of their own. Netflix versus Hulu will make them both too big for HBO or NBC to compete with on anything looking like equal terms; the remaining studios and networks should pool their resources. It’s either that, or go to Amazon and make a deal with Bezos.
Just saying.
So Fox is getting out of the movie and content-creation business, and will be solely involved in purely new TV content-delivery.
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This is the end of an era.
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It actually doesn’t sound very good for 21st C long-term, as TV networks are moving towards a vertically-integrated sole-source content model to sweep up both advertising *and* syndication revenue. Without it’s own TV studio and/or negotiating a future revenue-share, the studio will get all the syndication money.
And, A New Hope is welcomed back into the Star Wars family.
… okay, so this does give ’em plenty of time to stick a bunchaton of backstory-free easter eggs/cameos into “Infinity War”.
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Sort of the way Howard the Duck had a cameo during the first “Guardians of the Galaxy”.
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Mew
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p.s. Can anyone else explain why the Guardians II soundtrack had Sweet’s “Fox On The Run” on it? I still figure there’s a storyboard (or, hopefully, a filmed sequence) featuring Nebula (or, less likely, Gamora) that falls in between I and II that they chose “Fox On The Run” to back .. but it was cut as “not advancing the plot” or whatever.
The thing that really jumped out at me was that the sports channels escaped.
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With ESPN failing, it’s interesting that they didn’t want to eliminate a rival.
I’m going with either they recognize it’s an area The Mouse culture can’t really succeed in or .. that sports are about to undergo a fragmentation that’ll make a sports *channel* an even tougher road.
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It’s cultural, but not political, so .. a cat thinks it’s the latter. Football’s days have been numbered since medical types started figuring out chronic stress injuries and chronic traumatic encephalopathy … and until something replaces it, a sports network seems .. risky.
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Mew
At the very least, Disney needs to figure out why ESPN is failing before it shells out money for another sports channel.