DISNEY BUYS 20TH CENTURY FOX

[LotsoA113]

Shocked we don't have a thread up for this yet, but yeah, Disney just bought 20th Century Fox folks! The studio behind films as wide and varied as Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans, Die Hard, Bride Wars, Avatar and The Revenant now belongs to Disney as well as every other entertainment entity from News Corp. that isn't the FOX channel, Fox Sports and Fox News.

I'm pretty negative on this news overall tbh. Yeah, I'm a Marvel geek and an MCU fan so the prospect of finally getting a good Fantastic Four movie and some X-Men that actually look and act like their comic book counterparts is cool, but way more important that is the monopolistic pattern of Disney swallowing up yet another big movie studio (one of the six big American movie studios in fact!). Considering Disney was just strong-arming journalists not to write negative press about their theme parks, giving this kind of entity even more power just doesn't seem like a good idea. Plus, the hundreds of jobs that will be lost in the process is awful to see and it's unlikely Blue Sky Studios is gonna survive, at least in its current form, during this merger (Ferdinand becoming a newly minted box office bomb this weekend doesn't help).

What do y'all think of this Earth shattering news?

[Ben]

Well, Disney didn’t just buy Fox, and they don’t own it yet. The deal has been agreed but it’ll be six months to a year and a half before Disney owns all and starts making any changes.

Besides, while I’m no fan of the Murdochs getting in at the Mouse House, I would rather Disney keep buying and expanding that itself getting swallowed up and broken up as almost happened in 1984.

[Randall]

I am always concerned about corporations getting huger and huger. And there may still be a chance that the deal may be blocked if governments agencies don't like the terms.

Having said that, I'd love to see Spidey interact with the Human Torch on screen. And an end of the current cycle of X-films.

Plus.... just maybe we could see the original cut of Star Wars on Blu-ray?

[Jpcase]

So...does this mean that we'll be seeing Anastasia at Epcot and Scrat at Animal Kingdom? Kinda kidding, but in all seriousness - why not? If Disney is going to own a whole bunch of new animated characters, it will be interesting to see how far they go towards integrating them into the Disney pantheon.

There are some definite downsides to this. If DreamWorks ends up folding, as some have speculated, and Disney doesn't do anything with Blue Sky, then...the American animation scene is going to be really sparse. What other established animation studios are there in Hollywood right now? Illumination, Animal Logic, and Sony? Any others? The Despicable Me franchise has big pull at the box office, and The Lego Movie is brilliant, but none of those three studios has really established itself as a competitor to Disney, in same vein as DreamWorks. I'll be curious to see if one of them emerges as a major player in the next few years.

As for what this means for Marvel, I'm in a very small minority, in that I genuinely like superhero films, but don't particularly care for the MCU. I mean, some of those films have been fun...but they all just feel so homogenized. You'd never get something like X2 (or presumably Logan, which I still haven't seen, but have heard good things about) if the X-Men were a part of the MCU.

One of the things that I love about the superhero genre is how any given series could be given a totally different interpretation, depending on the director. Or how different franchises from the same comics publisher could be given totally different film treatments - there's no need to adapt Superman the exact same way as Batman. Nor is there any need to make the next Superman adaptation anything like the last. And that's pretty great.

The more characters that get included in "cinematic universes" though, the less variation there's going to be - and the fewer choices there are going to be for people whose tastes don't fit exactly one type.

[Randall]

I would shed no tears over Blue Sky not making more films, though I'd certainly feel bad for their staff if they close. Meanwhile, DWA has meandered into mediocrity, unfortunately. Still, you make a good point. More variety, and more studios is a better way to have things.

[James]

I actually feel the exact opposite as you regarding the superhero films. All the X-Men films feel exactly the same to me just with different plot points, while each MCU movie almost feels like a different genre. Captain America 1 was a war movie, CA 2 was a spy thriller, 3 was a more traditional teamup. Thor 1 was a fish out of water story, T2 was more fantasy, T3 was basically a comedy. The GotG moves are more sci-fi. Dr Strange was asian/celtic mysticism. Spider-man was a kid dealing with high school and personal issues story. Iron Man is just Iron Man, but c'mon he started it all! And Black Panther looks like something new again.

Not saying each was fully in a different genre, but they all usually have enough of something other than the superhero genre to feel a bit fresh and new.

As for everything else, I think Disney might keep Fox around as a label -- like Marvel, Pixar, and Lucasfilm -- either just for archival purposes, or maybe to use as a separate studio for new stuff like Touchstone and Hollywood pictures were back in the day.

[Randall]

The MCU films certainly have excelled at operating in different genres, and that is one of their greatest strengths. Still, there is a sameness about them. As much as I love them, there are similar story points that tend to come up, though that's part of being within the greater superhero genre. "Greater power/greater responsibility," the hero's journey, fighting doppelgangers, etc--- the tones and settings change, but some elements do repeat. But then, that's true of any genre.

The X-Men films, however, are the poster children for repeating themes, not to mention focusing overly on the same characters while ignoring others, and spotlighting the same relationships and conflicts over and over again.

[EricJ]

The X-Men films, however, are the poster children for repeating themes, not to mention focusing overly on the same characters while ignoring others, and spotlighting the same relationships and conflicts over and over again.

Fox's X-Men films are now the poster child for the one problem everyone deep down wants to express about the Cape Wars, but isn't comic or movie-backgrounded enough to know how to: "It's OUR ball, Disney, and you can't play with it, so there! We're going to have our own game without you, nyeah! "
A problem that will become even more defined when a still-rebellious Sony, refusing to admit defeat after "Spiderman: Homecoming", tries to make a, I kid you not, "Sony Marvel Universe" out of "Venom" and "Silver & Black". (Sable and Cat, in case you're wondering.)

I remember trying to explain the problem by paralleling the studio Cape Wars, and our clueless frustration with thinking Disney/Marvel was making all of them, even the bad Fox and Warner/DC ones, with the first 00's days of CGI comedies, or 90's days of bad Disney-wannabe animateds, and our first awakening realization that the latest bad Dreamworks or Sony CGI comedy didn't come from "The studio that brought you Toy Story and Shrek!" And even then, all we wanted to do was "shut down Disney for starting the whole thing!", unquote, because we didn't know the difference, and just wanted to find the Bad Man Responsible and hit him.
It took us years to realize that, and it seems to be taking even longer with the bad B-studio super-films.

[Ben]

Double-U.

Tee.

Eff...!!!???

[EricJ]

Translation: Some of the rest of us are just NOW realizing that it's not Marvel we're sick of "flooding us with stupid-hero movies", it's Fox. Took us danged long enough to figure that out. (As for Warner, Wonder Woman pretty well clinched the argument on that one.)
Almost as long as it took us to figure out other "Brand X" issues of overexploited movie trends, in other decades...It's always something.

(No, seriously, is English your second language? There are previous posts that have made me wonder.)

[LotsoA113]

20th Century Fox, Fox 2000 and Fox Searchlight will be continuing on as existing labels at Disney (Fox 2000 projects, like their past films like Hidden Figures, will be released through 20th Century Fox). Looks like 20th Century Fox will be the new Touchstone Pictures, doing 12-14 adult skewing movies a year, a direction the studio had been pivoting towards in recent years, especially in 2017 with he majority of their slate being adult-skewing mid-budget drama fare like Murder On The Orient Express, The Mountain Between Us, The Greatest Showman and The Post. Fox Searchlight will continue to do 6-8 movies a year and likely help Disney become an award season juggernaut. As of now, Fox's current upcoming slate is intact, though all four Avatar sequels will now be released under the Disney banner.

It's nice that's Fox will continue to produce more movies but it doesn't remove the monopolistic tendencies of the whole affair and the fact that hundreds of jobs will be lost because of this.

[ShyViolet]

Wow, pretty weird about the Fox name change thing. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter THAT much to me, but won’t this make all those Fox jokes the Simpsons (and Family Guy!) have made over the years kinda confusing for future audiences??

[Bill1978]

I guess its no different to pop culture references that date movies and TV shows within 5 years of them being released. I actually think it's a clever strategy cause even when Disney didn't own 20th Century Fox I was often confused with how you could have 'conservative' Fox News and 'liberal' Fox Television.

[Ben]

It’s all change again, as Disney officially drops Fox from the branding, which makes sense since Mirdoch kept the name for his networks.

So the film company will now be 20th Century Studios going forward, and the indie/arthouse label will be Searchlight Pictures.

While it’s Murdoch that should have sold the full name along with the assets, or changed his name back to News Corp. this will ultimately mean less consumer confusion, especially with all the different Fox networks vs. Fox Television production companies. And it totally gets rid of the stupid 21st Century Fox branding that was pretty pointless.

In a way, this is going right back to Century's beginnings, which was known as Twentieth Century Pictures when it was founded, and added the Fox when it merged with William Fox's Fox Film Corporation, making the original Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation (the two literally just spliced their names together with a hyphen).

So the new change returns Fox Film to its original 20th Century name and, while it adds Studios, takes the original Pictures and adds that to Searchlight instead. It’s a little sad to see the studio vanish almost completely, but at least they’re honoring the legacies of each and take out the potential confusion that the continued use of the Fox name could have. New logos will begin to go out on upcoming promos and films starting immediately.

[Daniel]

For a split second thought Lotso had come back!

...I like the rebranding. Does feel less confusing. Heh, the mouse killed the fox.