The Chilling Implications of a Disney
Fox
Reports of the film industryâs impending death have been greatly exaggerated. Itâd be more accurate to say the business is consolidating  with earnings for some major studios soaring in recent years and others taking big write-downs. Head and shoulders above everyone else is Disney  which reported profits of $2.5 billion in 2016 and made five of the 10 most successful films of the year (including the top three). The company  which owns Lucasfilm  Marvel Studios  and Pixar  already makes almost $1 billion more than its next biggest rival. That casts the news of its reported interest in acquiring  Fox  in an even more daunting light.
The deal Disney and  Fox  discussed  initially reported by CNBC  would sell âmost ofâ 21st Century Fox to the Walt Disney Company  though not the broadcast network or its sports programming (Disney already owns ABC and ESPN  making similar acquisitions moot and possibly illegal). This acquisition  which has apparently been discussed âon and offâ for weeks and is currently inactive according to The Wall Street Journal  would focus on  Fox âs film studio  smaller cable channels like FX and National Geographic  and international assets like Sky TV. It would  essentially  amount to a merger of the first and third biggest movie studios  resulting in a potential monopoly that my colleague Derek Thompson noted could be illegal.
Whatâs unsettling is that Disney is already focused on making films on the largest scale possible  leaving little room for the kinds of mid-budgeted dramas and comedies that used to thrive in Hollywood. If  Fox  were subsumed  that would leave Disney with only four major rivals: Warner Bros.  Paramount  Universal  and Sony  all of which also rely on revenue from other sources (mainly television) to make money.  Disney/Fox  would be a corporate monolith like no other  with an even larger stable of superheroes to throw around.
As the CNBC story describes   Fox  supposedly opened talks with Disney because of a âgrowing belief among its senior management that scale in media is of immediate importance and there is not a path to gain that scale in entertainment through acquisition.â Disney  it seems  is the only company with the âscaleâ that  Fox  has in mindâthe kind of limitless funds that can compete with expected future rivals like Amazon  Google  and Netflix. This line of thinking may seem a little strange coming from  Fox   the company that distributed the most successful film ever made (James Cameronâs Avatar  which has four sequels in production) and owns the rights to the X-Men franchise  which has been a solid earner for almost 20 years.
Reports of the film industryâs impending death have been greatly exaggerated. Itâd be more accurate to say the business is consolidating  with earnings for some major studios soaring in recent years and others taking big write-downs. Head and shoulders above everyone else is Disney  which reported profits of $2.5 billion in 2016 and made five of the 10 most successful films of the year (including the top three). The company  which owns Lucasfilm  Marvel Studios  and Pixar  already makes almost $1 billion more than its next biggest rival. That casts the news of its reported interest in acquiring   [TGT] in an even more daunting light.
The deal Disney and   [TGT] discussed  initially reported by CNBC  would sell  [TGT]  to the Walt Disney Company  though not the broadcast network or its sports programming (Disney already owns ABC and ESPN  making similar acquisitions moot and possibly illegal). This acquisition  which has apparently been discussed âon and offâ for weeks and is currently inactive according to The Wall Street Journal  would focus on  Fox âs film studio  smaller cable channels like FX and National Geographic  and international assets like Sky TV. It would  essentially  amount to a merger of the first and third biggest movie studios  resulting in a potential monopoly that my colleague Derek Thompson noted could be illegal.
Whatâs unsettling is that Disney is already focused on making films on the largest scale possible  leaving little room for the kinds of mid-budgeted dramas and comedies that used to thrive in Hollywood. If   [TGT] were subsumed  that would leave Disney with only four major rivals: Warner Bros.  Paramount  Universal  and Sony  all of which also rely on revenue from other sources (mainly television) to make money.  Disney/Fox  would be a corporate monolith like no other  with an even larger stable of superheroes to throw around.
As the CNBC story describes    [TGT] supposedly opened talks with Disney because of a âgrowing belief among its senior management that scale in media is of immediate importance and there is not a path to gain that scale in entertainment through acquisition.â Disney  it seems  is the only company with the âscaleâ that   [TGT] has in mindâthe kind of limitless funds that can compete with expected future rivals like Amazon  Google  and Netflix. This line of thinking may seem a little strange coming from  Fox   the company that distributed the most successful film ever made (James Cameronâs Avatar  which has four sequels in production) and owns the rights to the X-Men franchise  which has been a solid earner for almost 20 years.