CNBC has a really interesting story out about some back room talks that have been going on between Disney and FOX. It looks as though Disney might be getting ready to buy a good chunk of the company (everything but the NEWS division, Sports Division, and Local Affiliates). That Means 20th Century Fox and all of it’s movie properties would become part of the Disney Family. The most relevant part of that right now means that Disney and Marvel Studios would finally regain the film rights to characters including: The Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, Glaactus, The X-Men, Deadpool, and every other member of Marvel’s mutant universe.
According to the report, the deal is all about survival and scale from FOX’s perspective. They don’t think they can scale up their presence in media to compete with the bigger companies on the market right now, especially when companies like Google and Facebook have changed the way people consume media. Instead, they would rather focus more tightly on sports and news so that they can compete more effectively in those categories and not lose ground in all of them.
So, why doesn’t Disney just buy it all? Other than the fact that FOX doesn’t really want to sell everything, it would look bad from a monopoly standpoint if Disney owned two of the four main TV networks as well as owning both ESPN and FOX Sports.
The real question is, what could this mean for Phase four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe?